Severance

Shen Fever turns its victims into automatons who repeat the routines of their former lives — filing papers in empty offices, folding laundry, setting tables — until they die. Ma published this in 2018, four years before the actual pandemic gave it a second meaning nobody anticipated. But the horror of Severance was never primarily about disease: it was about the difficulty of distinguishing Shen Fever victims from ordinary workers in late capitalism, who also show up to offices they find meaningless, perform routines they can't explain, and go through motions whose original purposes have long since dissolved. Candace, a Chinese American production coordinator for a Bible manufacturer in Manhattan, watches New York empty out while continuing to file invoices, update spreadsheets, and document the city's collapse on a photography blog. She is the clearest-eyed person in the novel because as an immigrant navigating the labor market she was never allowed to forget that the performance of productivity is exactly that — a performance. The most formally precise satirical novel about capitalist alienation since White Noise, and the one that most directly asks whether the pandemic changed anything or just made visible what was already there.