I’ve just had the extremely strange experience of being happy when a book broke the spell I was under and revealed itself to be a book. I’d already begun an adversarial relationship with this book—How High We Go in the Dark, a novel in short stories about a pandemic that begins with the release of a virus through melting permafrost. I was lured in by the promise of black humor in the idea of an amusement park for plague-ridden children, so that they can die on a roller coaster instead of a ventilator. In retrospect, I have no idea why I thought that would be funny—I guess I was imagining the ad campaign—and in the hands of author Sequoia Nagamatsu it is… not funny at all, but poignant and terrible and true, like the first 2/3 of the book, intertwined stories of people dying and grieving, of those who leave and those who stay behind.
I totally understand the icky feelings because I had that same experience watching the season finale of The Last of Us. I was totally unfamiliar with the game, so I had to sit for days with the impossible moral quandary the creators laid out. But now that it’s a week or so behind me, I am so glad I watched it.
I totally understand the icky feelings because I had that same experience watching the season finale of The Last of Us. I was totally unfamiliar with the game, so I had to sit for days with the impossible moral quandary the creators laid out. But now that it’s a week or so behind me, I am so glad I watched it.