We had known ourselves to be cowards and hypocrites, pernicious liars really, and to find this suspicion confirmed was not a relief but a horror." "We were ashamed of leaving people behind, of taking our comforts where we could find them, of stealing from those who could not defend themselves. They execute any ailing residents and loot the homes. The group gathers supplies by going on "stalks" - expeditions into houses, some filled with living but infected people. We found one another after fleeing New York for the safer pastures of the countryside." Their ragtag group is led by Bob, a humorless IT specialist who promises to lead them to a safe place called "the Facility" in a Chicago suburb. "And in the Beginning, there were eight of us, then nine - that was me - a number that would only decrease. "After the End came the Beginning," she explains. Soon, Candace is - as near as she can tell - one of the only living people in the nation. As a hobby, she maintains NY Ghost, a blog featuring her photographs of life in the city.ġ3.7: Cosmos And Culture How To Love The Zombie Apocalypse She and her boyfriend pass the time watching movies in his basement apartment. She has a respectable job at a publishing production firm, where she outsources printing jobs to facilities in China. It's a fierce debut from a writer with seemingly boundless imagination.Ĭandace's life in New York might not be what she dreamed of, but it's not all that bad.
The novel's protagonist, Candace Chen, departs the city she's called home for years not because of a tough job market or skyrocketing rent, but because the world as we know it is coming to an end. In a way, Ling Ma's shocking and ferocious novel, Severance, is a play on the "Why I left New York" theme, but it's one you'll actually want to read. The pieces are usually bittersweet and elegiac seldom, if ever, do they say "My company transferred me to the Denver office" or "I just got tired of paying $20 for a hamburger." If you've spent much time reading personal essays on the Internet, then (a) you're a masochist, and (b) you've probably noticed a subgenre of the form that involves the author explaining why they left New York.
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