How high does the darkness go? Pretty high, it turns out. These stories focus on primarily Asian protagonists that live quiet lives staving off the dark, often at great personal cost. The first one-hundred plus pages or so is far more like “misery porn” than A Little Life is (and I don’t agree with that label even a little bit for A Little Life, ps). Despite best intentions or because of casual cruelty, a virus breaks out and sweets the world. Albeit far more slowly than Corona did, depending on where the character is located in the world. In fact the timeline makes almost no sense after reading all the stories. But regardless, euthanasia parks for children are opened as kindergarten variants ravage them, spirits of ostensibly dead babies are carried into the light, and the malaise trudge on; such as a doctor looking for a cure. More attached to a cadaver than her husband trying to save their marriage.

Thematically, there are some interesting points. Marginalized voices and bodies depicting a post-virus world, attempting to find some joy or peace or love for their remaining family members. The relationship all of the world has to death shifting is the most interesting aspect to it, for me. Yet when that aspect is actually interrogated by the reader it leaves it somewhat desired. There’s a couple systemic references to this change, but nothing else. The voices of the characters themselves are quite similar as the larger work goes on, making very few of the stories feel distinct. Only one really sticks out in my mind as completely novel. The last story in particular I deeply, deeply disliked, leaving me with a discernible no doubt sour note.

Literary fiction at the intersections of fantasy (no, not sci-fi, at all, imo) peppered with speculative elements without any rigour. I am getting really sick of literary writers clearly not caring about the sci-fi or fantasy tool-kit those writers practice and completely disregarding where these themes and ideas have been worked on for ages and ages. They just pop up a central conceit that’s fantastical or scientific and then never actually apply and rigour at all to it. It’s just dressing. Very few can get away with it and I think the only reason it persists is because literary consumers have no idea, having rarely, if ever, read genre fiction.

Where this book does shine is in the overall flow of the book, which moves along very quickly for a book with small type and depressing thematics and characters. The prose are fairly solid, just not the character voices. The character work itself aside from that also felt solid, if not truly stand-out. And the larger theme is workwhile, as is spotlighting marginalized identities in crisis books like this, who too often shirk those viewpoints for macro perspectives or default ones.