Candace describes it as “a fever of repetition, of routine,” and its victims find themselves going through the motions of their daily lives, now emptied of meaning, again and again and again: A mother sets the table for her family and then resets it, a little girl pages through her favorite book while she holds it upside down, a young woman tries on all of her clothes. The apocalypse created by Shen Fever is only loosely a zombie apocalypse. In that later timeline, Candace is part of a small sect of survivors trying to scrounge a survival out of what’s left of a Midwest ridden with plague. In alternating chapters, Candace tells us the story of the world circa 2011, when she spends her days grinding her way through her dull job in New York - and the world a few months later, after the arrival of a plague known as Shen Fever. Severance revolves around a woman named Candace, who immigrated to the US from Fuzhou in China when she was 6 years old as the novel opens, she is working at an art publisher, managing Bible production. It is also about the soul-sucking nature of life under capitalism. Severance, a radically understated debut novel from Ling Ma, is about a zombie apocalypse.
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