‘The Plague’ and ‘Contagion’ are popular again. Why are we drawn to fictional pandemics when we’re in the middle of a real one?

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From The Deseret News:

In a twist of uncanny timing, Emily St. John Mandel is releasing her newest novel in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. But it’s her last novel that has people interested, and for good reason: the subject of her last novel was a world-wide pandemic.

Her novel “Station Eleven” was a hit when it was published in 2014 — it has sold 1.5 million copies, been translated into 27 languages and was a finalist for the National Book Award. But in the last few weeks, the novel — set in a world in which a strain of flu has decimated most of the world’s population — has had another surge of popularity.

Though Mandel has been promoting her new novel, “The Glass Hotel,” over the last few weeks, she remains confused about the new readers swarming to her last novel.

“I don’t know who in their right mind would want to read ‘Station Eleven’ during a pandemic,” Mandel said, according to Vulture.

. . . .

But “Station Eleven” isn’t alone in seeing a surge in popularity. Other tales of epidemics, plague and apocalypses have received a boost from the COVID-19 outbreak.

The 2011 film “Contagion” made its way to iTunes’ top movies list in March, while the 1995 film “Outbreak” and the Netflix documentary series “Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak” were among just some of the shows that have gained popularity on Netflix in recent weeks, according to Business Insider.

. . . .

Meanwhile, Albert Camus’ classic novel “The Plague,” originally published in 1947, has seen its sales jump dramatically in Europe, according to The Guardian.

The novel sold 226 copies in the United Kingdom in February 2019 and 371 in February 2020.

But the first three weeks of March 2020? The book sold 2,156 copies.

. . . .

Author Stephen King set fans straight about his 1978 novel “The Stand,” which is about a weaponized strain of influenza that kills 99% of the world’s population, according to USA Today. “The Stand” has also been on Amazon’s Top 20 Most Read book list for the last five weeks.

King tweeted on March 8 in response to fans posting on social media comparing the coronavirus pandemic to the events of the book. “No, coronavirus is NOT like THE STAND,” King tweeted, adding that COVID-19 is “not anywhere near as serious” as the vicious disease in his novel.

. . . .

Yet the fact that “The Stand” takes such an apocalyptic view of a pandemic could be part of what is drawing readers to it in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak, according to Dr. Kyle Bishop, a professor of English at Southern Utah University.

Bishop told the Deseret News he has been rereading King’s novel lately because it helps him “put things in perspective.”

“On some level, we have to use fiction to explore the anxieties and fears that we have,” Bishop said. “So, in that way, fiction functions similarly to a science lab — which is, let’s put these things into motion and let’s see what happens.”

Stories are a “safe” way to explore possible outcomes of challenging or frightening situations and to deal with fears associated with them. This isn’t just true of stories about pandemics.

The aftermath of World War II and the rise of nuclear weapons led to the popularity of fiction about the possibility of World War III and nuclear warfare, according to Bishop. This includes films like “Godzilla” and the 1953 adaptation of H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds,” as well as novels like “Alas, Babylon” and “A Canticle for Leibowitz.”

“Once society becomes aware of a threat, that threat becomes the focus of narrative,” Bishop said.

Storytelling is a method that humans have used to manage their fear of the unknown for centuries. Boccaccio’s “The Decameron,” written in the aftermath of the Black Death in Italy in 1348, depicts a group of 10 young people who quarantine themselves together to avoid the plague. To pass the time, they tell each other stories.

Link to the rest at The Deseret News