The End of October
By Lawrence Wright
Knopf, 2020

As all readers of Frank Herbert’s Dune will recall, past a certain very discreet point, all prescience is painful. If the daily tabloid psychic warns “A great man will fall while the sun stands high in the sky,” we all smile. If that same psychic were to warn, “President Kennedy will be shot dead in Dallas on November 22, 1963,” our reaction would be instantly, intensely different, probably suspicion bordering on anger. We might routinely say we’d like to know the future, but implicit in that wish is that knowledge would come with power. An itemized sheet of all the bad things that are going to happen to you would make very, very off-putting reading.

This uncomfortable mixture of dread and sublimated anger is in store for readers of The End of October, the new novel from Lawrence Wright (most noted as the author of a work of nonfiction, 2006’s The Looming Tower). In it, a microbiologist named Henry Parsons travels to an internment camp called Kongoli in Indonesia, where several people have died from an unknown cause. Parsons quickly determines that the culprit is a new kind of disease, and that many people carrying the disease have since gone to Mecca on hajj. “Let’s say a thousand people are exposed right now,” says one character. “Each of them is likely to spread the contagion to two or three people, and then those two or three infect another two or three. You see how quickly it multiplies.”

“There will be runs on the stores,” that character goes on. “Pharmaceuticals, groceries, batteries, gas, guns, you name it. Hospitals will be overwhelmed, not just with the sick people but with the worried as well.”

Readers in May of 2020 will read such passages in a cold sweat, and that reaction will have nothing to do with Wright’s relatively modest abilities as a thriller-writer. By sheer coincidence, by one of the single greatest flukes of timing in the entire history of publishing, a manuscript Wright wrote more than a year ago so effectively predicts the world we’re all living in today that reading these pages is often nothing short of horrifying. After finishing The End of October, readers will reflexively flinch from the phrase “like something out of a novel.”

The book has other subplots - Islamic fundamentalist and computer hacking, mainly - but who in 2020 will be able to notice them? When reading passages like this:

Danger is invariably present in the investigation of an unknown pathogen. Diseases may arise from many sources, including viruses, parasites, bacteria, fungi, amoebas, toxins, protozoa, and prions, and each has a strategy for survival. In addition to the multiple ways infection can spread, serious diseases can masquerade as something common and relatively harmless. 

Or when Parsons reflects: “Disease was more powerful than armies. Disease was more arbitrary than terrorism. Disease was crueler than human imagination,” and then speculates, “He was nearly certain that the disease in Kongoli was not bacterial. This was something new. It could be a coronavirus like SARS or MERS …” Every twenty pages or so (the rough frequency of Wright’s exposition-dumps), readers living in quarantine and watching the news every day for escalating death-counts, readers already fixedly, wearily familiar with novel terminology like “pandemic” and “vector” and “herd immunity” and “lockdown,” will have to brace themselves for more of their grim new realities being weirdly transmuted into thriller-fiction before their eyes. 

Many of those readers simply won’t be able to continue reading The End of October. The novel isn’t even “too soon” - it’s “ongoing,” and that may be too much for people who are worrying in the here-and-now about elderly relatives, lost jobs, or lines to enter the grocery store. Those people of course have an endless array of escapist reading to help, but they should remember that Wright here is an exceptionally lucky visionary, not a soulless opportunist. It’s not his fault that we’re all living in the worst-case-scenario he only imagined. And although it’s not great literature by any stretch, The End of October is by default the most timely book imaginable.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.