Come slowly, Lord Jesus
I want the kingdom of God to be civilized. If possible I'd like to be able to keep sleeping in my own bed.
As a general rule, I do not read dystopian fiction. Sometimes, however, my distaste for the genre is superseded by my pathological need to be a good book club member. I am loathe to skip a meeting, and I don’t like to attend without having read the book. This is how I came to read Station Eleven, the highly acclaimed 2014 National Book Award finalist by Emily St. John Mandel: under the duress of peer pressure. It’s a well-executed and engrossing book that I cannot stop wishing I hadn’t read.
I spent a recent Saturday with my nose in the book, if one can still use that phrase for reading a book on the Kindle app for iPad. I slept terribly that night, as I often do when my mind is enmeshed in something unpleasant. I dreamed myself into the disturbing near-future that Mandel imagines: a civilization extinguished by a massive influenza pandemic. Nearly everyone gone, and nearly everything gone, too.
In a haunting chapter titled “An Incomplete List,” Mandel catalogs the casualties of the flu apocalypse:
