Doomsday Book | Musings of the Monster Librarian

There are a lot of books out there to choose from if you want to jack up your anxiety levels right now by reading about pandemics, but there are a few that are far-out enough that you can probably read them without comparing them to our current situation. Whether they’re set in the future, supernatural in nature, or just outside the realm of probability, these books offer us pandemics that can’t touch us.

The Fireman by Joe Hill. The pandemic is caused by a spore that spreads a condition called “dragonscale” that eventually causes the infected to overheat and spontaneously combust. Harper, the main character, who is infected, pregnant, and a nurse, is a complex and fascinating character coping in the midst of panic, disease, isolation, and fear.

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. First off, I am biased towards anything by Connie Wills, but this really is a compelling book, impossible for me to put down once I start it. Willis has written a series of time travel novels and short stories that take place at Oxford University, mostly in the history department, headed by Mr. Dunworthy. Kivrin, one of his students, has been preparing to visit England near the time of the Black Plague, but due to an error in timing, ends up in the midst of it, a stranger in a community that is disintegrating and literally dying. In the future, plague is spreading speedily through Oxford, which has been locked down in quarantine procedures, and when it is discovered that the tech running the time machine is patient zero, Dunworthy’s superior shuts down the department entirely, leaving Kivrin lost in the past and pandemics raging in both places. Despite the terrifying circumstances, Willis manages to find humor in the humanity and oddities of many of the characters in a story that is dead serious.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. This book has gotten plenty of attention, including compliments from George R. R. Martin. It is post-apocalyptic, varying between a storyline about a group of musicians and actors traveling between the small communities left after a pandemic killed off most of the people, and vignettes about the past, and the people who died from the disease, described in a memorable fashion.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks: If ever you wanted an alternate history of how an outbreak can spread and lead to massive changes in the world, you’ve got it here. Brooks uses a different narrative approach than readers may be used to, with his work consisting of short narratives, or “interviews” with different people who lived through the outbreak and the zombie war.

Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra: In this series of graphic novels, disease has killed off all the men except one, Yorick Brown, and his pet Capuchin monkey Ampersand. I don’t consider this horror, but it is a brilliant concept, and pulled off beautifully.

Far be it from me to dictate an entire canon of works (at least today) but there are definitely some books by women authors that deserve to be known better than they are, and they often get shorted because the story of Mary Shelley and Frankenstein is pretty amazing, so everybody writes about her. There are lots of great women writers who aren’t Mary Shelley, though, and I can only claim to have read a few of them, despite my intention to do better. Here are some books you might have heard of but passed on for some reason– or maybe they are unknown to you.

1.) Beloved by Toni Morrison.

Toni TheMorrison is a great American writer, so I hope most people at least recognize her name. Beloved was made into a movie, so it’s you may at least know of that. The story concerns Sethe, an escaped slave, living in Ohio many years after her escape, in a house haunted by a ghostly child. To say more than that is to give away what was (to me, anyway) the breathtaking, visceral shock of some of the book’s later events. Morrison uses a nonlinear writing style, and the events move back and forth in time, so this is not a quick, light, beach read. But it is certainly one that will leave an impact.

2.) The Keep by Jennifer Egan

The Keep is a nested story, with a story about a character situated in a Gothic trope– visiting an acquaintance who is renovating a castle with Gothic terrors and trappings, which is also a playground for bored people who want to imagine they are living in the Gothic… and all of this is framed by yet another story. The Keep does not tie up all of its loose ends, so if that bothers you, be warned. It’s really hard to describe this in just a few sentences without giving up some of the surprises in the plot, but suffice it to say that it is suitably creepy and unsettling. I’d save this for when you have plenty of time.

3.) The Castle of Los Angeles by Lisa Morton

The Castle of Los Angeles won a Stoker award in 2010, and was mentioned in the second edition of The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror. Two of our reviewers chose to review it independently of each other, and both of the reviews were glowing. Despite her reputation as a horror writer, though, it is possible that you might not have come across this book, because it was published by a small press, Gray Friar Press, that does not (to my knowledge) seem to exist anymore. Cemetery Dance has republished it as an ebook, but hard copies appear to be only available used, so you would probably have to be looking for it specifically, or be blessed with serendipity, to come across it. The Castle of Los Angeles takes place in a haunted theater, the Castle. While it uses many Gothic tropes, Morton makes them her own, and her eccentric mix of characters and their reasons for living in the Castle make it a unique contribution to the haunted house genre. It is a treasure for lovers of quiet horror.

4.) Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

If you are purely a horror reader you might not have come across the brilliant Connie Willis, who is primarily known as a science fiction writer. Among her other works, she has written a loosely connected series of books about historians in an alternate future who use time travel in their research. In Doomsday Book, history student Kivrin’s research trip to the Middle Ages is derailed when the tech running the machine collapses, having entered incorrect coordinates that send her to the time of the Black Death. The tech turns out to have contracted an unknown and deadly disease that spreads rapidly through the area, and the time travel lab is quarantined due to suspicion that the disease escaped from the past when Kivrin went through, trapping her there. This isn’t horror in the traditional sense, but the reader is a witness, through Kivrin, to the despair and terror caused by the Black Death. The parallel plot of the quarantine during the spread of the unknown disease in the future is more science-fictional, but Willis does not pull her punches, and she doesn’t seem to have compunctions about killing off characters you’ve grown to care about. The story builds over the course of the novel, and it is exhaustive in its detail, so you have to be patient, but it is so worth poking your toe outside the horror genre to delve into the horror and consequences of the spread of an epidemic disease.

5.) Nameless: The Darkness Comes by Mercedes M. Yardley

While she has published short stories and novellas before, this is Mercedes Yardley’s debut novel, and the first book in her Bone Angel trilogy. It’s relatively new, having just been released in December. We just reviewed it here, and when I asked my reviewers for a book by a top woman writer in the horror genre, this is the one that was suggested. Luna, the protagonist, can see and speak to demons. When her niece is kidnapped by Luna’s brother’s ex-wife, a demon named Sparkles, the game is on! Described as “whimsical”, “gritty”, and “macabre”, this novel, while technically an urban fantasy, gets high marks from lovers of horror as well.

I hope you’ve had a great month of reading women horror writers this month– but don’t stop now! Enjoy!