Review: Station Eleven

Station Eleven
By Emily St. John Mandel

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a sneeze.

Twenty years after a deadly virus killed 99.99 percent of the population, effectively ending life as we know it, a band of traveling musicians and actors performs Shakespeare by candlelight, bringing moments of beauty to weary survivors struggling to exist in civilization’s ruins. A charismatic psychopath calling himself “prophet” behaves as badly as you’d expect a self-proclaimed prophet in a post-apocalyptic landscape to behave. The best friend of a long-dead once-famous actor collects and displays useless artifacts from a forgotten time: smartphones, tablets, stiletto heels. And a comic book about a ruined world, written years before the collapse, connects them all.

Mandel deftly weaves these complex threads into a chilling tale that is by turns darkly comic, horrifically bleak, and achingly brilliant. A beautifully crafted post-apocalyptic survival story for grownups.

— Andria L. Amaral, Main Library, Charleston, S.C.

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