Darth Pedant

Fun fact: Nearly every time I read a book involving a pandemic wiping out 99% of humanity, it coincides with me catching a cold. My immune system is not only totally sucky, it’s also highly suggestible. Apparently.

 

I was hoping to love this more than I did. Literary doomsday novels are possibly my favorite brand of doom and gloom. This one had a good story, but the writing didn’t float my boat. I wasn’t a fan of the excessive sentence fragments or the fragmented narration style, and some of the stylistic choices just led to confusion. Thoughts weren’t differentiated from prose in any way, so there are sudden skews from third person to first, and sometimes the effect was disorienting.

 

Still, the writing is good, even if it wasn’t exactly my cuppa, and the characterization was pretty stellar. If Ann Patchett wrote doomsday novels, I think they’d feel a lot like Station Eleven.

 

I read this for the Halloween Bingo 2018 Doomsday square.