In 2022 and 2023, writers I interviewed (as part of a part-time gig) were always quick to assure me that their book was not a “COVID novel.” I understood why. Nobody wanted to be reminded of the months they’d spent locked up alone in their homes, of wiping down delivery box surfaces, of the endless sirens that’d ripped through the silence.
I’d written a version of my debut novel, Westward Women, before the pandemic. But I rewrote it after 2020. As a result, it is in many ways a “COVID novel.” In it, a mysterious infection prompts women to migrate westward toward the Pacific Ocean in the summer of 1973. Rather than trying to trace the contagion back to a patient zero or find its biological cause (or cure), the book follows three women caught up in the country’s anxious riptide of response to something they cannot fully understand. It’s a book interested in the ways certain groups of people (because of their gender, race, class, sexual orientation, etc.) are more at risk of catching contagions; the way people seem to get sick and better (or not) without much rhyme or reason, breeding rumored sources of danger or salvation; and the way that attempts at quarantining can make one long so deeply for movement, for people, for connection, for change that it feels physical. The book is an expression of what I came to realize in the wake of our own pandemic: that contagions are not just biological, but social.
My novel is not alone in its interest in the social, rather than biological, implications of contagion. In fact, rather than thinking of books post-2020 as “COVID novels,” I’d suggest we think about them as joining a long lineage of “social contagion novels,” or novels that thoughtfully, controversially, and often thrillingly engage with the social aspects of the communication of something nominally unwanted from one person to another.
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
Granted, this one is perhaps not so much a “novel” as it is a collection of short stories. But the excellent frame story setup gives these stories a linked quality. Ten people are quarantining themselves in a villa while the Black Death devastates nearby Florence. To pass the time, they trade stories, 100 in total. While the stories themselves often don’t mention the plague, they do depict (often with humor) both the everyday social dynamics of fourteenth-century Italy and the subtle changes social roles were undergoing at the time, in part as a result of the widespread contagion. The book also inspired Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, which has a similar frame story, and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” in which a rich Italian throws the equivalent of a quarantine party while a contagion known as the Red Death rages outside the walls of his abbey. In these tales, illness is not the only thing that is contagious; so are stories, which we retell again and again, in new cultural contexts and new cataclysmic disguises.
If you haven’t read Albert Camus, here’s a good place to start: a perfect encapsulation of his absurdism that makes the novel’s underlying pessimism palatable. Set in the 1940s Algerian city, Oran, The Plague charts the progress of a plague outbreak, starting with the widespread death of the city’s previously unnoticed rats. As the ensuing city-wide quarantine progresses, we see residents come together as a community of mutual support and yet still ultimately come apart under the psychological strain of the epidemic’s effects. Read as both a reflection on the real-life cholera epidemic in Oran in 1849 and an allegory for French resistance against Nazi Germany in the 1940s when the novel was set and written, The Plague has no shortage of layers to its understanding and treatment of what a “contagion” can mean.
Where Camus uses absurdism to help readers see the social depths of contagion, Ling Ma uses satire. And like my novel, Severance uses an alternate history timeline to re-examine the present through a distanced lens. In Ma’s novel, Shen Fever—a fictional fungal infection that causes victims to repeat the same routines until they die—has devastated society. Candance Chen, a first-generation Chinese immigrant and immune survivor, is one of the few who remains in post-apocalyptic Manhattan, still finishing out her work contract with an inane corporation. From the fevered and unconsciously iterative actions of the infected to Candance’s longing for connection with the people from her past, Severance offers up a twist on the zombie-infection genre that confronts the impacts of people’s global movements, the power of nostalgia, and corporate control.
On the surface a more traditional zombie apocalypse story, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One takes on a much more vexing problem than many of the zombie thrillers that feature gross-out kills and unlikely head shots. Mark Spitz is part of the “American Pheonix” campaign, a resettlement program that aims to retake Manhattan from the zombies currently inhabiting it. But not all zombies are made equal; some who succumbed to infection have all the trademarks of traditional Hollywood zombies while other are “stragglers,” creatures who can’t move from a particular location they had some connection to in the past. The resettlement soldiers, too, find themselves too obsessed with the past, suffering from a PTSD-adjacent condition called PASD (post-apocalyptic stress disorder). And the society these soldiers are working to rebuild often appears in its corruption and inequalities more like the worst parts of the old than anything resembling something new. Caustically funny and unexpectedly tender, Zone One blurs the lines between the “before” and “after,” distinctions we often draw across society when contagions come along.
I read Noami Alderman’s charged novel about a year before starting Westward Women and found in it a blueprint of sorts. Alderman’s book follows multiple women in disparate places and situations to demonstrate the far-reaching social effects of a mysterious ability that begins to more-or-less infect women. This approach to portraying a chorus of women who are suddenly imbued with qualities no man can understand stuck with me, as I began crafting my own cast of characters. But where my novel explores what happens when men fear and try to control women because of an inexplicable infection, Alderman’s flips the traditional gendered power dynamic, interrogating what happens when women gain the ability to physically dominate men for the first time. The “power” in Alderman’s novel is electrical jolt that women can now deploy on anyone. As a world under female hegemony proves to be more familiar in its violent acts of dominance than utopian, the four women at the novel’s core grapple with the fallout in ways that still show how individual agency intersects with social movements in complex and unpredictable ways. Less a contagion, perhaps, than a developing evolutionary trait, the ability woman possess in Alderman’s novel demonstrates how when we stop obsessing over the potential biological catalyst, we can better understand the social reality of the way we relate to one another.
How High We Go In the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Like The Power, Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go In the Dark is kaleidoscopic in its view of a contagion’s global reach. But Nagamatsu subtly suggests we consider the way society impacts environmental outcomes, and how climate change itself is a kind of contagion—sometimes in both literal and figurative ways. In a near future, an archeologist grieving the death of his daughter unearths a frozen girl in the permafrost of the Arctic Circle while on a research trip. Once thawed, this unlikely patient zero spreads the long-dormant virus that killed her, a contagion with reverberations that reach around the world and across centuries, linking Nagamatsu’s vast cast of characters in unexpected ways. By telling this story through such a nuanced, hard-to-track web of relations, Nagamatsu invites us to think about the interconnectedness of contagion and our environmental world not only in his novel’s content but also its form.
The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay
Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World is a story about contagious ideas. Yes, it is also about four zealots who arrive at a family’s vacation cabin to harass them into sacrificing one of their own to prevent the end of the world. But at its core, it’s invested in a series of questions more akin to why people get involved in cults. Why is it that people begin to follow a leader to often violent and devastating ends? What convinces us that an idea we’d never believed before is suddenly more important than another person’s life? There is nothing biological that is contagious Tremblay’s text. And I am not ultimately interested in if the world ends after the final page or not—to know would be the “biological” answer, the myth that what is contagious can be “solved.” Instead, I’m fascinated by the ways the four intruders try to persuade their target family of an impending doom and how their belief that the doom is real makes it so, whether it is or not.
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
This was the book that changed the game for me. When I read it, I remember thinking, “you can do that in fiction?” Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake is split between a post-apocalyptic world—in which a lone human survivor called “Snowman” attempts to live amongst a primitive humanoid race called the Crakers—and a pre-apocalyptic dystopia where Snowman is still just a boy named Jimmy. In a world controlled by huge global corporations (I can’t imagine that, can you?), Jimmy teams up with a childhood friend-turned-bioengineer to create a eugenics-oriented super-pill that ultimately causes a society-ending pandemic. In case that wasn’t already too messy for you, throw a beautiful woman and a love triangle into the mix and you’ve got a real cause for global chaos. As with much of Atwood work, the brilliance here doesn’t just come from the novel’s prescience about corporate interests that control the world from behind a curtain (although that’s there, too). The brilliance of this novel also stems from the heartbreaking portrayal of the very human desires and ambitions we have—sexual, professional, and otherwise—that are often behind the most famous epi- and pandemics in our history (and likely our futures).
The Illness Lessons by Clare Beams
As a professor of nineteenth-century American literature who also writes historical novels about women-focused contagions, I must be the most niche of target audiences for Clare Beams’ The Illness Lessons. In nineteenth-century New England, Caroline Hood has somewhat reluctantly helped her father start a boarding school to educate young girls. Soon after, the school’s strong-willed and popular queen bee, Eliza, becomes the first to fall ill with some strange sickness characterized by burst blood vessels, strange speech tics, physical weakness, and rashes. As the other girls follow suit, Caroline’s father becomes desperate to solve the problem these sick girls represent to save his school. Beams’ novel intrigues not by promising an answer to the medical mystery but by revealing how men in power are not, in practice, just trying to solve a scientific problem, but rather seeing the women themselves as problems to solve. Alas, such is a “problem” that can’t be solved, especially when treatment of the “sick” strips the people at its center of the agency to testify to what might really be its cause.
All Better Now by Neal Shusterman
I’ll leave you with a fun one, which is to say one that is not really that fun at all if you consider Neal Shusterman’s penchant for penning compelling young adult novels with devastating premises. Published in 2025, All Better Now owns its relation to the COVID-19 pandemic without naming names. In this YA dystopian, a disease that spreads contentment has split society into two camps: (1) those in power who thrive financially and politically when people experience want and suffering and (2) those who have experienced the disease firsthand and are grateful for the gift of happiness it provides. While power players whip the world into a frenzy to find a vaccine, recoverees start a cult-like movement to spread the disease as quickly as possible. A clever twist on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, All Better Now is a novel as suspicious of cures and those who peddle them as it is of contagions and the blissful ignorance of those who spread them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alice Martin holds a PhD in Literature from Rutgers University. She is an Assistant Professor of English Studies at Western Carolina University, where she teaches fiction writing and American literature. She lives outside of Asheville, North Carolina with her husband, her son, and too many typewriters. Westward Women is her debut novel.