If such stocking up is common sense, it’s also a form of denial. aspirin, garbage bags, bleach, duct tape.” He survives for months, and watches the rest of Toronto die outside his high-rise. John Mandel’s “ Station Eleven,” a “Georgian flu” flattens the world’s population, and one character makes six trips through the grocery store, dragging carts loaded with “cans and cans of food, all the tuna and beans and soup on the shelf . . . In Ling Ma’s “ Severance,” a pandemic renders most of the world “fevered,” and a crew of survivors is rewarded by the endless material recompense of life in a mall: shelves of L’Occitane hand lotion, racks of Gap T-shirts. This is the survivor’s dream: bulk-packed goods of Costco abundance. There comes a moment in every disaster novel when a character stocks up on supplies or fantasizes about discovering them. Rumaan Alam’s new book follows its characters to the Hamptons as the world crumbles around them.
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