The Zombie You Know—Thoughts on Ling Ma’s Severance

By Katherine Fusco

In Ling Ma’s Severance, the undead are familiar. They are familiar not because, in the year 2020, we have all lived through the zombie trends in literature, film, and television. The fast zombie, the slow zombie, the funny zombie, the smart zombie—we’ve had them all. No, the undead in Severance are familiar because they are so much like you and I. 

Set in the recent past, the novel alternates between a young woman named Candace’s last days working for a large publishing company for which she organizes the overseas production of collectible Bibles and a period months later during which she travels westward from New York to Chicago with a band of survivors, who gather supplies and methodically execute the “fevered” they encounter. 

Your average zombie is an eater. Think of the flesh picnic from Night of the Living Dead (Romero 1968)—a scene that still horrifies. But in Severance, the fevered are relatively benign, confused beings who thoughtlessly recreate the routines of daily life—setting the table, driving the car, executing the menial tasks of a typical workday. As I said, they are familiar. No, the real eaters in Severance are the living, a fact Ma expertly captures in a narrative that identifies luxury brands, restaurant names, and film and song titles in a constantly-running catalogue of that which we consume. Clinique face creams and Woody Allen films alike take on totemic qualities. With equal parts empathy and criticism, Ma exposes the way in which the consumption of commercial goods structures our lives and our relationships with loved ones, and then the way in which this selfsame consumption may destroy the world. 

For, as much as this is a novel of New York City, the protagonist running a photo blog called NY Ghost (the name taking on new meaning after the fever), it is also a novel that takes on global capitalism and its circulation of products and people, capturing the ways in which some people are allowed to move and others are fixed in place. For example, Severance tracks the tentacles of a product called the “Gemstone Bible,”  conceived of in Manhattan, contracted out in Hong Kong, marketed in the American Bible belt, and extracted in part by miners in rural China, whose lungs are being destroyed by the dust of the novelty gemstones.  

From a keepsake Bible to a diseased organ half a world away, Severance balances a bodily intimacy with a view to the systems that organize these bodies into trancelike routines, and which, in the novel’s apocalyptic fiction, may ultimately be the undoing of these bodies. With Severance Ma has given us a novel of the undead that implicates her living readers and makes our daily routines appear as frightening and insidious as any plague of zombies. 

Nevada Reads book cover images: Ling Ma and Jessica Bruder

Severance by Ling Ma and Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder are the 2020 book selections for Nevada Reads—a statewide book club that invites Nevadans to read selected works of literature and then come together in their communities to share ideas and perceptions inspired by the books they have read.

Double Down blogger image credit: Katherine Fusco

Katherine Fusco is associate professor of English at the University of Nevada. She has published on American literature and film and is currently working on her third book, which focuses on celebrity and identity in the 1920s and 1930s. She also blogs about motherhood and creativity at createlikeamother.blog You can see more of her work at www.katherinefusco.com.