🦠 Book Review: Severance by Ling Ma
⭐ Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
A brilliant premise, a fascinating ride… and then it just... ends?
⚠️ Spoiler Warning:
This review includes major spoilers and the full ending. If you haven’t read Severance yet, grab it now and come back when you’re emotionally prepared for the final two pages to be your last.
🧠 What I Thought (The Rambling Honest Part)
Have you ever read a book that gets better and better with every page—and you’re totally locked in—because the premise is SO GOOD and you’re thinking “Yes! YES! Where is this going? There are SO many places this can go!!”…
…and then it just ends?
No big reveal. No satisfying resolution. No ambiguous, clever literary mic drop. Just… done. Like someone tripped over the power cord and said, “Yeah, that’s enough.”
That’s how Severance went for me. I was this close to a 5-star rave. And then I had to double check my copy to make sure pages weren’t missing. Sadly, they weren’t.
So yeah. 5 stars became 3. Still worth reading. But I’m salty.
📘 Overview of Severance by Ling Ma
Published in 2018, Severance is a genre-bending debut novel from Ling Ma. It’s part satirical office novel, part immigrant family story, and part slow-burn zombie apocalypse—but like, make it literary.
It’s funny, eerie, cynical, and weirdly cozy for a book about a pandemic that turns people into zombie automatons stuck in nostalgia loops.
🧳 Full Plot Summary (Spoilers Ahead!)
The story follows Candace Chen, a 20-something Chinese-American woman living in New York City and working at a Bible-printing publisher (yes, that’s a real job). Her days are filled with meetings, emails, and indifference—until Shen Fever, a strange fungal pandemic from China, starts turning people into repetitive zombie-like shells who just… do the same thing over and over until they die.
Candace, who is nothing if not a routine girlie, barely notices the apocalypse at first, and even keeps going to the office long after everyone else has fled. When she finally leaves, she’s found by a group of survivors led by Bob, a tech bro-turned-cult-leader who’s guiding them to a mysterious safe haven he calls “the Facility.”
The narrative bounces between pre-fever, post-fever, and Candace’s childhood as the child of Chinese immigrants.
🧟♀️ The Fevered
Shen Fever doesn’t make you violent—it makes you ritualistic. You fold laundry endlessly. Stir an empty pot. Pace the same path. It’s capitalism meets zombie trope, and it’s weirdly poetic.
Candace realizes nostalgia is the trigger when her friend Ashley catches the fever while trying on childhood dresses. Bob finds out and straight-up murders Ashley and Janelle (who wasn’t even sick!) for breaking his weird survivalist rules. So, yeah, things get dark.
👩👧 Candace’s Past
We learn Candace’s backstory: she was born in China and came to the U.S. as a kid to live with her immigrant parents, Ruifang and Zhigang. Her mom is strict, her dad works nonstop, and eventually both parents die—first in a car accident, then from early-onset Alzheimer’s. Candace grows up feeling culturally unmoored and emotionally disconnected.
She studies photography but ends up in a soul-sucking office job. Her boyfriend, Jonathan, is an idealistic anti-capitalist who dumps her when she won’t leave NYC with him. Then—plot twist—she finds out she’s pregnant with his baby.
🏬 The Facility
Bob’s so-called Facility turns out to be… wait for it… an abandoned suburban mall. (Because, of course.) He keeps Candace locked in a L’Occitane store for her “safety” since she’s pregnant and therefore carrying a holy miracle or whatever.
She starts seeing visions of her dead mother encouraging her to escape. Meanwhile, Bob slowly succumbs to his own nostalgia (he used to work at the mall) and catches the fever himself.
Candace finds him wandering in a daze one night, steals his car keys, and flees the mall.
🏙️ The Ending (Wait, That’s It?)
Candace drives toward Chicago. That’s it. That’s the ending. No showdown. No final twist. No big reveal. Just… her and her unborn daughter Luna, headed to the city to start fresh.
She reflects that she’s always been a wanderer with no real “home,” but wants something better for her daughter.
And then… THE END.
Like, that’s the last line. You’ll reread it 3 times thinking there must be a second epilogue somewhere. There isn’t.
⚠️ Trigger Warnings
This book contains:
-
Pandemic themes & mass death
-
Gun violence & character deaths
-
Religious cult behavior
-
Parental loss & illness (including Alzheimer’s)
-
Pregnancy and confinement
-
Anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist commentary (in case that’s sensitive content for you)
📚 Read This If You Like:
-
Literary fiction with dystopian flair
-
Quiet, dark humor about modern work life
-
Zombie stories that don’t involve gore
-
Books about identity, disconnection, and survival
🛒 Buy the Book
👉 Buy Severance by Ling Ma on Amazon (affiliate link)
📖 You Might Also Like:
If Severance left you intrigued but unsatisfied, check out:
-
🧼 My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh – equally deadpan, equally disconnected, but somehow more satisfying.
-
📦 The New Me by Halle Butler – another look at office ennui, but darker and sharper.
-
🧬 Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel – beautifully written literary apocalypse with a more satisfying payoff.
-
🔥 The Power by Naomi Alderman – speculative fiction that explores big themes but doesn’t fizzle at the end.
💬 Final Thought
Severance is a smart, haunting, and deeply original novel that absolutely nails the vibe of being stuck in meaningless routines. It’s clever and immersive and uncomfortably relevant.
But the ending?
Let’s just say… if this book were a work meeting, it ended mid-slide with a frozen Zoom screen. 🧍♀️
Still worth the read—but maybe keep your expectations for closure in check.
Comments
Post a Comment