9 Books with Metaphorical Maladies

Find Me, by Laura van den Berg
Joy is an isolated addict living a dead-end life when a strange outbreak sweeps the country, a fatal disease that starts with memory loss and devolves from there. Saved by an unexplained immunity, she’s first hospitalized, then later strikes out on her own, taking a surreal journey across a stricken America in pursuit of her birth mother and the secrets of her own past. The book treats its illness incidentally: the plague is supernatural not in the sense of the occult, but that they’re metaphorical, allegorical—not bound by strict science, but vectoring in ideas.

The Country of Ice Cream Star, by Sandra Newman
A nomadic tribe lives in an America generations after the emergence of a disease that kills everyone by the age of 20. Ice Cream Star is our heroine, a girl who sets out to find a cure for the disease after her brother starts developing its symptoms. Like Joy, she travels through a transformed American landscape, a frightening country of children who speak in an inventive linguistic style.

The Plague, by Albert Camus
Although black plague is ostensibly the epidemic in the city of Oran, Camus’ novel is as much about that as The Crucible is about the Salem witch trials. Which is to say, not very much. So while the disease isn’t supernatural, Camus uses it as an agent of allegory, not just of the Nazi occupation of France, which had occurred just years before this novel was written, but a larger metaphor of existentialism and absurdity. The Plague’s lack of specificity means it’s still relevant today: what is the next thing that will catch us out, unprepared?

The Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler
Disease isn’t central to Butler’s novel of a crumbling, wracked near-future America; this apocalypse is more death by a thousand cuts. However, the main character, Lauren, has a malady called hyperempathy, which causes her to feel any injury she sees. The exact mechanism is unknown, and, like many intangible mental illnesses, some doubt hyperempathy’s existence. Lauren’s extreme sensitivity in (and to) a world gone brutal and callous is central to the nascent religion she cultivates throughout the novel.

The Fever, by Megan Abbott
Teenage girls in a decaying rust belt town begin seizing and hallucinating, struck down by a mysterious malady one by one. The novel made me flash back to junior-high bathrooms, where a herd of girls would discuss who got her period and who lost it. Most of it was innuendo, if not straight-up bull. Abbott’s noir take on an illness rampaging through a school full of adolescent girls makes concrete the anxiety surrounding burgeoning female sexuality and the virality of gossip. The girls’ shift from children to sexual beings is ultimately pathogenic.

Blindness, by Jose Saramago
Three years after the publication of Blindness, Saramago won the Nobel Prize for Literature. And no joke: It is a fantastic novel. An epidemic of blindness hits an unnamed city, moving from person to person without apparent pathogen. The infected are impressed into camps, which are full of cruelties both personal and institutional. When the camp walls are breached, it turns out the world at large fares no better than the first infected. The miniature of the plague house stands as a metaphor for larger society.

The Devil’s Alphabet, by Daryl Gregory
The citizens of Switchcreek, Tennessee, were afflicted by an acronym disease many years ago, one that transformed them into a catalog of freak-show specimens: argos, blanks, or chubs. Paxton Martin, who ostensibly avoided this pathogenic transformation, returns to his hometown, and finds that he, like most of us, can’t quite fit back into the place he grew up in. You can’t go home again.

The Flame Alphabet, by Ben Marcus
The source of disease in Marcus’s novel is the voices of children, which become fatal even to their own parents. The epidemic divides families and sows dissent, and likewise the book itself provokes extreme reactions. The stricken parents of a heedless child are forced to plan their escape in a world where communication between generations has become impossible.

Pontypool Changes Everything, by Tony Burgess
One of a loose trilogy of novels about outbreaks of civic violence, Pontypool centers on a language virus like that in The Flame Alphabet, but with more pulp. Burgess’ novel is often described as zombie fiction, as its characters submit to the aphasia and then cannibalism of a word disease—without words, we’re just dumb animals.
What metaphorical plague stories have infected your mind?