As an English major, I was assigned books dealing with wars, from the big wars to the mini Spanish-American War. A professor told me once that nearly every author who was alive at the time of the Titanic sinking wrote a poem or essay or something about it. But I never read any literature about the 1918 Influenza or other disease outbreaks. If it existed, it didn't survive the tests of time. Modern authors do touch on it in historical fiction-occasionally.
I read four books about the 1918 Influenza during my childhood and college years. The two that deal with the pandemic as a main plot are Palace Beautiful by Sarah DeFord Williams, which I reviewed on my book blog back in middle school, and Gracie's Angel by Launi K. Anderson. Both were set in my home state, Utah, so I thought back to them during the early stages of lockdown for a model on how my community would react to this. I don't know if I would've been aware of these books if they weren't local titles. Gracie's Angel is part of a seventeen book historical fiction series and I get the sense that it's only being written about because after so many books, the author had to scrape the bottom of the historical barrel. No Peace with the Dawn is another local read. It's about World War I, but towards the end it touches on the pandemic as it affected the student body of Utah State University. The only non-local book I'd read was Shoeless Joe & Me by Dan Gutman. Stosh, a teenage boy who can time travel with vintage baseball cards, goes back to 1919 to prevent the Black Sox Scandal. He meets his great-great-uncle, an influenza patient, and Stosh just so happens to have modern flu medicine on him. When Stosh comes back to the present day, Uncle Wilbur is living with the family.
Two months ago, I saw an agent or editor on twitter saying she wanted to read a YA covid romance. She added, "must wear masks and follow social distancing." I rolled my eyes so hard. The people of September 2020 did safe things the people of March 2020 would think are paranoid. The people of spring 2020 did "safe" things the people of September 2020 know are paranoid, like healthy people wearing a mask while jogging. If we can gain that much perspective in six months, what will the people of March 2021 think of their younger selves? It takes roughly two years for a book to get written, queried, agented, edited, and published. Often it takes much longer. A modern person cannot write about the pandemic without their perspective becoming dreadfully dated.
I saw another writer tweet that she's writing a book where characters wear masks in the winter and do distance learning if they're sick. I think distance learning is a safer bet, but I don't know if healthy people will still go masked several years down the road. They didn't after the influenza. The only part of our society the 1918 pandemic really reformed was the health care system. Germany had an unsuccessful revolution that was spurred, in part, by the pandemic worsening economic conditions and some churches did switch from communal cups to individual sacrament cups. But I didn't know about those sacrament cups until this summer and Germany's aborted revolution is minimized by the legacy of World War II. Covid is front and center in everybody's lives, but in a few years, something else will be.
I don't think books dealing directly with covid will sell well for three reasons. First, this is a boring apocalypse. I'm part of the Hunger Games generation, I know how these are supposed to go. Unless you lost a loved one, all your covid memories are blah. Both of the two books I mentioned previously that put the pandemic front and center killed a main character. Shoeless Joe & Me unkilled a character. My mom and grandma have covid right now, my brother and I are quarantining while we wait for test results, and I'm in no mood for character mortality. How do you write an interesting covid book without making readers gloomy? I interview people about covid experiences all the time for a research project I'm working on. I thought those interviews might provide fodder for a non-fiction covid book, but after doing so many of them, I've realized that most people's pandemic experiences are pretty boring.
Second, the dystopian books of the Hunger Games era boom still exist. Why would I go read a new disease book when I have Lauren DeStefano's Wither trilogy? Why would I read about an oppressive or dysfunctional government when I have Gemma Malley's The Declaration and Neal Shusterman's Unwind series? The third and most important reason people won't want pandemic books is fatigue. I don't like the way covid is dominating every conversation. In the first few months, my memories of those influenza books were important to me, but now I wouldn't read one. People are so over this.
While we probably won't get a crop of covid books out of this, we will get authors. Forcing work and school online will turn some people into writers who wouldn't have written normally. After months to reflect on it, I really think people don't have more time during the lockdown than they do normally. If you're unemployed, that's different, but people are still bound by time even if they aren't by place. You still go to work or school, you just zoom it. But the drudgery of online working promotes procrastination. I have two jobs and I'm a student and I really was supposed to do things today, but season four of The Crown is great, thanks for asking. Some people will be motivated to write by lockdown boredom. Some published writers who are laid off from their day jobs will focus on writing more to make up lost income.
Pandemics and all their effects-like lockdown mental illness, government inefficiency, hypocrisy in public spaces, and the virtue-signaling of mask wearers posting to all their mask-wearing followers about how cool mask-wearing is-will produce new thoughts in people. New thoughts make new books. John Green and Kathryn Stockett both wrote their first published novels to cope with 9/11 grief. Neither has anything to do with terrorism. People process emotions through all kinds of stories and the books we see coming out of this latest pandemic won't necessarily be the ones we expect.
I was already working on a project when the pandemic hit. My main character lost the bottom half of her face in a fire and covers it in a veil. I usually wear cloth masks, but I do have a bandanna, and I probably would have had her use a bandanna if I'd started it during covid. I have no intentions of changing her veil, but I did add a new scene with another burned character recently and had that character wear a bandanna.
That book is an other world fantasy, which is what I usually write, but I finished the rough draft of a contemporary YA last week. I don't know when that book will be published, so I refer to covid only in the past sense and don't mention how old my seventeen year old character was when it happened. I figure so long as covid has taken place within the past twelve years, she will have been old enough to have solid memories of it. She references covid twice. In both cases, I made sure to make the references hopeful, even when I was talking about death. One was a quick reference to the protagonist taking virtual tours of historic sites. The other direct reference takes place on a college campus where a door is painted red to memorialize the school's use as a hospital during the influenza. I got the idea from a red door at Utah State University. My own college also had a building used as a triage, and though that building's still standing, I've gone here four years and only learned about its history last week. There are no books dealing with BYU's covid experiences that I'm aware of, so all I had was USU as a model. My main character and an older college student use both the influenza and covid to talk about how the future is long, tragedies fade, and life always gets better.
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| The Karl G. Maeser Building was used a triage during the influenza outbreak |
Ultimately, covid is going to end. Parts of the world will change, yes, but probably not in the ways our dystopia-trained brains expect. Authors may wish to shy away from disease books, but it will prove a ripe breeding ground for new authors who deal with troubling times in creative and reflective ways.
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