Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Okay. Honestly. This was about the most terrifying book that I've ever read. It wasn't like a horror novel--it was terrifying because it seemed like it could have been real, like this really could happen in our world, and this is how our society could fall apart. This is a dystopian novel, but unlike most dystopian stories, this doesn't take place a couple hundred years in the future after everything's been figured out again--it's written about the moment when everything is falling apart and how our society falls apart, and in the years immediately following. A flu pandemic sweeps through the world, a super-contagious, super-fatal, super-fast-working strain of the flu, and basically 99% of the world's population gets wiped out within three weeks. When this happens, all of the services and products and things we are used to in our society are GONE. No more electricity, gasoline, telephones, Internet, travel, food deliveries, police, anything. The very few people that are left have no choice but to revert basically to the hunter-gatherer stage, and live off of scavenging and start to slowly figure out survival. The story follows four or five people at the time of the collapse and what happens to each of them--how they die or survive, what they do and what their lives are like afterwards.

The prose is tight and beautiful, and the story is so well-crafted that it felt 100% believable. That is what made it so terrifying. I seriously cannot stop thinking about how fragile our society is now and how quickly it could all end if something terrible like that happened. For three days after reading this I kept feeling like it really happened and looking around at everything imagining it being a ghost town and trying to figure out how we would survive. And the thing is--we wouldn't. We totally depend on the food being trucked in to our grocery stores, the police to keep us safe, the doctors and medicines keeping us alive. So it would definitely be better for us to die in the flu pandemic than to try and stay alive afterwards... although I'm just going to operate under the assumption that this will never happen.

There was a lot happening in this book. I feel like I wish there had been more with the graphic novel that the title of the book comes from--I don't totally understand the title or much about that storyline. I feel like Mandel could have made more about that storyline to make it make more sense and fit better with the rest of it. But honestly, the quibbles that I had were small.

I feel like this book is going to stay in my psyche though. It was so well-done and so good, but I almost wish I hadn't read it, because it's going to take a long time for me to stop imagining it and worrying about it.