Severance by Ling Ma: The Capitalist Apocalypse We Deserve

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Disclaimer: The following review contains spoilers, fungal metaphors, and critiques of productivity culture. If you're the kind of person who prides themselves on “only taking 3 sick days in 12 years,” you might be the target audience.

You’re Already in the Zombie Apocalypse, You Just Call It “Work”

You know that thing where you wake up, scroll through Slack with one crusted eye open, make coffee you don’t even taste anymore, and somehow arrive at 6 p.m. without remembering a single thing you did? That’s Severance. Not the show. The novel. And yes, it came first.

In Ling Ma’s version of the end of the world, the virus doesn’t make you run wild and eat brains. It makes you… do your job. Brush your teeth. Stir the soup. Forever. Until your body gives out. It’s not a stretch. Most of us were halfway there before COVID. We call it "routine." She calls it Shen Fever. Tomato, fungal plague.

Candace Chen: Patron Saint of Late Capitalism’s Burnout Baddies

Candace isn’t out here wielding machetes or hunting down supplies in a Mad Max wasteland. She’s doing what every good millennial does when civilization collapses: finishing the project. Holding down her desk job. Sending emails to an empty inbox while the city smolders outside.

Her motivations aren’t bravery or hope. They’re habit. Obligation. That buzzing anxiety that tells you you’re failing if you’re not producing something, even if no one’s left to consume it. She is what burnout looks like in a blouse from Zara, and she will absolutely outlast us all.

A Pandemic Book Before the Pandemic Hit? Ling Ma Knew Too Much

Severance came out in 2018. That’s right. Ling Ma predicted not only the general collapse of society but also your 2020 skincare routine, emotional numbness, and doomed return-to-office mandates. And she did it with style.

But this isn’t a COVID book. It’s sharper than that. It’s about the disease that was already inside us: our inability to unplug, even when unplugging is the only path to survival. The fever just gives it a name. Everything else? You were already doing it voluntarily, every day, on autopilot, in a blazer that still smells like dry shampoo and corporate guilt.

The Fevered Are You. No, Seriously. It’s You.

The infected don’t scream. They don’t chase you through grocery stores or try to rip your face off. They just repeat. Looping mundane tasks over and over like your uncle forwarding conspiracy memes. One woman sets the table, clears it, and resets it for no one. Another folds a shirt, unfolds it, folds it again. There’s no menace. Just muscle memory and quiet decay.

It’s genius. Ma doesn’t lean on gore. She leans on truth. The horror isn’t death. It’s the living death of never breaking pattern. Of dying with a checklist half-done and a Slack status still marked "available." She’s not describing a virus. She’s describing you, in Q4.

The Office as Mausoleum. The Commute as Sacrament.

Candace works for a company that produces Bibles. Printed in bulk. Shipped around the world. It’s almost too on-the-nose, except it works. Her job is logistics. The sacredness of scripture filtered through supply chains and corporate quotas. God as deliverable.

Even after the city empties out, she’s still showing up to her glass tower of fluorescent despair, logging hours. There's no boss. No paycheck. Just that gnawing need to not let it all go. The office becomes a holy site. A place of worship for those who believed in performance reviews more than actual purpose. Bless this spreadsheet.

Bob and His Cult of Survival: Just Another CEO, Really

Bob is the kind of man who thinks his Spotify Wrapped is a personality. He leads a survivor group post-collapse with the charisma of a bad LinkedIn influencer and the ethics of a pre-cancellation WeWork founder. He calls the shots. He distributes goods. He talks about “order” like it’s a brand he’s launching.

He isn’t building community. He’s running a startup, apocalypse edition. And just like every startup, there’s a vibe shift halfway through where you realize he’s not trying to help anyone. He’s trying to stay in charge. Bob isn’t the villain because he’s evil. He’s the villain because he’s normal. The world ended, and he’s still trying to be manager of the month.

Nostalgia, But Make It Corporate

Candace isn’t nostalgic for people. She doesn’t weep over lost relationships or social connection. Her flashbacks are soaked in the comfort of structure. Of brunch routines, subway rides, sterile apartments that look like an IKEA exploded. She misses function, not feeling.

And that’s what stings. Because we get it. How many of us cried when the Starbucks near our condo closed? Not because we loved the coffee. But because it meant we were really, actually alone. Severance doesn’t mock that loss. It exposes it. What we mourn in collapse isn’t each other. It’s the rhythm that kept us from noticing we were already gone.

Identity Is a Spreadsheet You Never Get to Edit

As the daughter of Chinese immigrants, Candace’s inner life is shaped by inherited expectations. Be dutiful. Be successful. Be quiet. Be grateful. She doesn’t rebel. She absorbs. She fits herself into roles so seamlessly it hurts to watch. Especially when there’s no reward. Just more work.

Ma unpacks that identity with a scalpel. Candace isn’t lost because the world ended. She was lost long before that, wearing the perfect outfit and saying the right things. Her grief isn’t loud. It’s ambient. And that’s what makes it real. Her trauma doesn’t explode. It spreadsheets itself across her life in neatly formatted, emotionally vacant cells.

Aesthetic Minimalism Meets Maximalist Commentary

Ling Ma writes like she’s running a quiet revolution in lowercase. Her prose doesn’t scream. It insinuates. Cool, clean, almost antiseptic. And yet every sentence cuts just deep enough to leave a scar. This is what weaponized minimalism looks like.

There’s a reason the novel feels slow. It mirrors the soul-deep drag of real-life monotony. You don’t get a chase scene. You get a meeting invite. You get a memory of your mother cooking congee. You get pages where nothing happens, except the realization that “nothing” is how most of us lived even before the world ended. Ling Ma doesn’t offer catharsis. She offers a mirror you want to throw across the room.

If You Liked “The Office” But Wanted Everyone to Die

Severance is not a zombie novel for people who like fast-paced survival horror. It’s for people who have ever stayed too long in a toxic job. It’s for those who checked their work email during a funeral. Who felt guilty taking a real lunch. Who miss the smell of office printer ink like it’s Chanel No. 5.

It’s not escapism. It’s entrapment. It dares you to confront the sick satisfaction of being a cog in a machine. And it doesn’t let you off the hook just because you read it ironically. If The Office is a satire of work culture, Severance is the post-mortem.

TL;DR – But Make It Judgmental

• Candace is your inner overachiever with no exit strategy.

• The infected are just peak productivity with a dash of death.

• Ling Ma saw your 9-to-5 lifestyle and raised you a slow-burn existential crisis.

• Bob is what happens when you give middle managers too much rope.

• The scariest part of this novel is how familiar it feels.

Final Word: Are You Working or Are You Fevered?

At its core, Severance isn’t a book about zombies or pandemics. It’s about the quiet horror of forgetting who you are in the pursuit of stability. About how easy it is to disappear while still technically functioning. About how survival isn’t always the same as living.

And honestly? Ling Ma didn’t need to write a sequel. We all became it.