The story begins in gripping fashion, on a cold, rainy night at a Toronto theater, where a performance of King Lear is cruelly interrupted when its leading man, aging movie idol Arthur Leander, keels over and dies onstage of a heart attack.

Instead, Mandel has fashioned a story about the connectedness of people to one another, and about the redemptive power and therapeutic necessity of art to our lives. But the book isn’t trying to be The Andromeda Strain either. It’s not fully clear whether the survivors were immune, or just lucky not to have crossed paths with any infected, or a combination of the two. This gives us a scenario in which survivors have long since settled into the routines of their new lives.

(Though interestingly, Mandel does name-check Justin Cronin’s The Passage.) Most of the post-collapse scenes in Station Eleven are set around two decades after the event that ends it all for us, a Captain Trips-like mutant superplague known prosaically as the Georgia Flu that kills within hours. John Mandel to task for not turning Station Eleven into merely the latest post-apoc horror epic to mimic The Stand or The Road or The Postman. So ingrained is this formula in the minds of audiences that many critics who ought to know better have taken Emily St. Inevitably, survivors split into two symbolic camps: those representing Hope and Goodness, and the other, typically led by some opportunistic, power-mad warlord, threatening Evil and Destruction upon them all. The dregs of humanity’s final remnants, shuffling through their hopeless existences dressed in rags, killing one another savagely over dwindling food and other resources. The hackneyed approach to the post-apocalyptic story is to spin a nightmarish and desperate tale, usually set in the immediate aftermath of civilization’s fall, depicting the day to day struggle for survival. Share book reviews and ratings with Thomas, and even join a book club on Goodreads.

Station eleven book cover