Finished Ling Ma's Severance the other night. I thought it was fairly good, though I'm surprised by the effusive praise; people seem to find it to be rather deep and emotional, while I found it removed and numb. I think that was the point, as the author's depicting a numb apocalypse; society fizzles out rather than dies violently. I just found the protagonist to be very disaffected and unmotivated, both before the fever and after. I think people walk through bad decisions (or avoid making any decisions) every day, but it's very hard to depict in fiction without being infuriating. I'm very curious about how literature from today will fare in the long run, as disaffected protagonists who eschew their agency are rather common these days.
I also found it odd that the nature of the apocalypse is being noted in reviews as novel or interesting; when people become "zombies" in this book, they just become fixed in their routines and lose all autonomy. It's a comment on habitual consumerism, but that's been an aspect of zombie fiction since Dawn of the Dead. Again, it's commentary, but also kind of removed and sad. The logistics of this zombie-ism are rather vague as well, as it's never quite explained whether the fevered are undead or on their way to death (at one point it's implied you'd just naturally starve and die when fevered, at another it seems more like zombie-ism, with people actively decaying while remaining at their day jobs).
All in all, it was a fine book, though I'd say that if you're looking for the story of an early-20s woman living off her dead parents' inheritance and smothering her feelings as an apocalyptic event shakes our greater status quo, Otessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a lot more incisive, satirical, and emotional.
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his hotel was completely demolished and a new building is in its place.
