My second Paul Tremblay novel. It seems to prove that the first of his that I read wasn't a fluke. Along with Josh Malerman, Tremblay seems to be bringing a freshness to the horror genre.
This one is a scarily appropriate book to read at the moment, despite having been written a few years back now. Set in an outbreak of a superfast and violent strain of rabies, it follows two women trying to find a safe place for one of them to give birth.
Like Cabin at the End of the World, this takes a big potentially world-changing event and concentrates on a very small cast caught up in the chaos of it all.
One of the things that sets this apart is that the characters at the heart of the story are unimportant to how the impactful event will play out. There are no scientists trying to get their miracle cure out to the world, no politicians trying to save as many as they can, just two very human characters, trying to get through it.
The story follows Ramola, a paediatric doctor as she tries to help her friend Natalie get to a hospital to have her baby. Natalie's has just been killed by a rabid intruder and Natalie herself was bitten as she tried to fight him off. The story only covers maybe three hours of their lives, but is packed with incidents and tragedies.
One thing that always bothers me in this type of survival horror is why the survival of the central characters is apparently more important than that of the people around them. In this book, it just isn't. This is something else that elevates this.
It's as much a character study of the two women as it is a horror story. We know them extremely well by the end of the book and feel enormous sympathy. The prose is the same lean present tense narration that characterised Cabin. This increases the tension with the sense of immediacy. there are also some neat tricks with they typesetting and layout which really add to the impact and the emotional punch - especially in the closing chapters.
It's been a while since I read Cabin, I can't remember if the superplague was one of the disasters we heard about in that book. It feels familiar though so I think the two books are part of the same fictional universe.
If you have the stomach for a book about a super contagious disease laying waste to a section of humanity after the past 18 months, this is a great one to try.
Available from all the usual outlets.
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