If you are someone who is drawn to sci-fi and horror in what you read, listen to, and watch, you are not alone, and fictionalized accounts of pandemics are likely to be of interest. One might imagine that filmmaker Fritz Lang anticipated such an audience when, in 1919, he wrote Pest in Florenz [Plague of Florence], a short silent film about the first outbreaks in Italy of the Black Death. That interest continues into the present. Even in the midst of a pandemic--or maybe because people have more time on their hands during the current COVID-19 pandemic--this genre is wildly popular in pop culture.
Here is a selected list of items, some of which may be new to you.
Articles
- Epidemic Entertainments: Disease and Popular Culture in Early-Twentieth-Century America
- Viral Hits: Your Pop Cultural Guide to Pandemics
- From Albert Camus to The Walking Dead: A Look at Pandemics in Culture
- Social Responses to Epidemics Depicted by Cinema
- Infectious Diseases in Cinema: Virus Hunters and Killer Microbes
Books
The Andromeda Strain by Call Number: PS3553.R48 A5ISBN: 9780061703157Publication Date: 1969The United States government is given a warning by the pre-eminent biophysicists in the country: current sterilization procedures applied to returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncontaminated re-entry to the atmosphere. Two years later, seventeen satellites are sent into the outer fringes of space to "collect organisms and dust for study." One of them falls to earth, landing ina desolate area of Arizona. Twelve miles from the landing site, in the town of Piedmont, a shocking discovery is made: the streets are littered with the dead bodies of the town's inhabitants, as if they dropped dead in their tracks. The terror has begun . . .
The Book of M by Call Number: 9780062669605ISBN: 9780062669605Publication Date: 2018-06-05Set in a dangerous near future world, The Book of M tells the captivating story of a group of ordinary people caught in an extraordinary catastrophe who risk everything to save the ones they love. It is a sweeping debut that illuminates the power that memories have not only on the heart, but on the world itself. One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man's shadow disappears--an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories. Ory and his wife Max have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day Max's shadow disappears too. Knowing that the more she forgets, the more dangerous she will become to Ory, Max runs away. But Ory refuses to give up the time they have left together. Desperate to find Max before her memory disappears completely, he follows her trail across a perilous, unrecognizable world, braving the threat of roaming bandits, the call to a new war being waged on the ruins of the capital, and the rise of a sinister cult that worships the shadowless. As they journey, each searches for answers: for Ory, about love, about survival, about hope; and for Max, about a new force growing in the south that may hold the cure.
- Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
Translated by John Payne--The Decameron comprises a group of stories united by a frame story. As the frame narrative opens, 10 young people (seven women and three men) flee plague-stricken Florence to a delightful villa in nearby Fiesole. Each member of the party rules for a day and sets stipulations for the daily tales to be told by all participants, resulting in a collection of 100 pieces.
Copyright status: Public Domain in the U.S.
Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Call Number: PS3531.O752 A15 1964Publication Date: 1939A collection of three novellas by Katherine Anne Porter, published in 1939. The collection consists of “Noon Wine,” “Old Mortality,” and the title story. For their stylistic grace and sense of life’s ambiguity, these stories are considered some of the best Porter wrote.
The Plague by Call Number: PQ2605.A3734 P4E5ISBN: 9780679720218Publication Date: 1947"Its relevance lashes you across the face." --Stephen Metcalf, The Los Angeles Times * "A redemptive book, one that wills the reader to believe, even in a time of despair." --Roger Lowenstein, The Washington Post A haunting tale of human resilience and hope in the face of unrelieved horror, Albert Camus' iconic novel about an epidemic ravaging the people of a North African coastal town is a classic of twentieth-century literature. The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a deadly plague, which condemns its victims to a swift and horrifying death. Fear, isolation and claustrophobia follow as they are forced into quarantine. Each person responds in their own way to the lethal disease: some resign themselves to fate, some seek blame, and a few, like Dr. Rieux, resist the terror. An immediate triumph when it was published in 1947, The Plague is in part an allegory of France's suffering under the Nazi occupation, and a timeless story of bravery and determination against the precariousness of human existence.
Description: Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have dreamed of preventing catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet, despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. From pneumonic plague in LA and ‘parrot fever’ in Argentina to the more recent AIDS, SARS and Ebola epidemics, the last 100 years have been marked by a succession of unanticipated outbreaks and scares. Like man-eating sharks, predatory pathogens are always present in nature, waiting to strike; when one is seemingly vanquished, others appear in its place. The Pandemic Century exposes the limits of science against nature, and how these crises are shaped by humans as much as microbes.
Source: Hurst Publishers