Survivor Song

Paul Tremblay's Survivor Song is a timely novel exploring the horror of infectious disease, but did not live up to the author's past works. Tremblay's story follows two friends, Natalie and Ramola, as they attempt to get the pregnant Nats to a hospital to have a C-section in the midst of a novel rabies epidemic. The virus rapidly transforms infected people and non-human mammals into not-zombie zombies that spread the infection through, you guessed it, a bite. The book is interesting because at the time of publication the world was in varying states of lockdown due to the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic. Survivor Song was either influenced by, or predicts with eerie accuracy, attitudes of the public toward the virus. The reader gets a good sense of who Nats and Rams are and becomes invested in them. Unfortunately every other character introduced felt flat and unimportant, like an NPC, having too little page time to really make the reader care. Additionally Tremblay made some bold creative choices in this book such as leaving large portions of pages blank to represent breaks in time or story. The effect resembled film editing, and was effective even if jarring. Somewhat more confusing were Tremblay's inclusion of a prelude, interlude, and postlude in darker colored pages with different fonts. Overall the book felt somewhat experimental, and achieved inconsistent success. For me, this one didn't live up to Head Full of Ghosts, but I'm still glad I read it.