The Plague
By Kevin Chong
Publication Year: 2018
Type: Fiction
Genre: contemporary, post-apocalyptic
Read on 2021-03-27
★★★★★
Like Severance by Ling Ma and probably others, this book, published in 2018, pre-dated and predicted the pandemic, manipulating the ruptures and revelations of a fictional plague event to comment on contemporary life and society. This book is set in my hometown of Vancouver and is deliciously local--it's pretty rare to see art actually set in and about Vancouver, and this book does not hold back in its criticisms of this city. I'd just moved back for about half a year when I read this in March 2021 and was still trying to take a temperature on the personality of this place (difficult to do with the lockdowns and outbreaks at the time), so I really appreciated the way this book is a portrait of this city and its denizens. Also apparently it’s a re-telling of The Plague by Albert Camus which I have not read, if this information is relevant to you.
This is one of only 20 or so books I own, and among those that I will keep and re-read.
