Survivor Song

This only slightly speculative thriller by Paul Tremblay takes place in contemporary Massachusetts, which is under quarantine due to the outbreak of a particularly virulent varient of rabies. Rather than dying in days or weeks, symptoms--loss of mental capacities, aggressive biting behavior, and death--occur within hours. When the husband of 8-months-pregnant Natalie returns from a fraught trip for groceries, an infected neighbor attacks them; Paul is killed and Natalie is bitten before she fatally stabs the crazed man. Natalie turns for help to her oldest and closest friend, pediatrician Ramola Sherman. Fighting panicking people who jam the road to the hospital, Ramola gets Natalie to a hospital for a vaccination, but it's not clear whether they made it before the virus has reached Natalie's brain. When an attempt to evacuate Natalie to a maternity hospital for delivery is thwarted by more infected victims storming the hospital, Ramola begins a desperate attempt to get Natalie to safety. The tension comes from the numerous obstacles they face--infected animals and people attacking them, roving armed bands of militia--as well as the uncertainty about Natalie's and her unborn child's future. Obviously a somewhat hyperbolic scenario of what we are currently facing with the COVID pandemic is depicted in the hysteria and violent reactions of the population. A fast read with well developed characters. All but the last chapter of the book takes place in the mere span of a few hours, and you know how it will end because the author warns you ahead of time. But it's a compelling ride.

NPR concludes their review by saying, "Survivor Song is a small horror story. A personal one. A fast and terrible one that is committed beautifully to the page. It goes on, piling banal complication on top of the awful terror of time running out, and crushes you in the most surprising of ways — with a look, a line, a touch, a memory, an inevitability that you saw coming from page 1. It exists in a pandemic world where all choices are bad ones. Where things unravel faster than you can possibly believe. Where happy endings are transactional: they come with a cost. Because Survivor Song isn't a fairy tale. It's a horror story."

The NYT notes the prescience of the author  writing something that sounds remarkably like our current situation: “In the coming days,” the narrator tells us, “conditions will continue to deteriorate. Emergency services and other public safety nets will be stretched to their breaking points, exacerbated by the wily antagonists of fear, panic, misinformation; a myopic, sluggish federal bureaucracy further hamstrung by a president unwilling and woefully unequipped to make the rational, science-based decisions necessary; and exacerbated, of course, by plain old individual everyday evil.”