When “Shen fever” hits New York, “Senior Product Coordinator” Candace Chen puts on a respirator with her company’s logo on it. She works in a fancy office 23 floors above Times Square. Your job is to get Bibles printed as cheaply as possible. It works best in China. In the deliveries of goods from there, however, are those fungal spores that quickly grow into a catastrophe. The fever they cause is fatal, it destroys the brain. Sick people go about their usual activities like zombies, neglect and starve.
Ling Ma, like her first-person narrator Candace, was born in China and grew up in the USA, unfolds in her debut novel „New York Ghost“ the story of a pandemic. Although it was written before Corona, a lot of it seems oppressively familiar: Initial carelessness, incredulous amazement when the disease grips the whole world, people in quarantine, people in masks and a great many dead. The pathogens did not develop in animals, but in the “special economic zones of China (…), where spores fed from the highly specific chemical mixtures”.
– .
