Paul Tremblay wrote 'Survivor Song,' about a rabies-like pandemic and armed conspiracists who make it worse, before COVID-19 was even a thing.
“Survivor Song” demonstrates Tremblay’s knack for psychological horror, a subgenre that tends to take unusual situations to the outer limits of credulity without crossing over into the supernatural, plumbing the terror and trauma of the not-quite everyday.“I tried to take on a trope of horror, tweak it and ground it in reality,” Tremblay said from his home outside Boston, where he’s a high school math teacher.
Humans lose their ability to speak coherently, and their motor functions deteriorate, essentially turning them into zombie-like creatures. If the afflicted bring to mind several kinds of mythical monsters at once, the author attributes that to the broad influence of a single disease on supernatural tropes.
Complications abound. The hospital is swarmed with people who have been exposed. Armed militiamen prowl the streets. Infected creatures keep crashing out of the woods. And Natalie is 8 1/2 months’ pregnant. Although its origin is never explained, “Survivor Song” isn’t a mystery; it’s a thinking person’s thriller, interspersed with moments of hilarity. It’s also formally inventive. Tremblay toggles between Ramola’s and Natalie’s perspectives and occasionally breaks the narrative to tell the story in other modes . Fans of Tremblay’s earlier novels will be rewarded with the return of a pair of characters — Josh and Luis — from “None of which is to say that the plot ever really slows down.
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