(originally posted on May 23, 2009)
I cannot express how glad I am this book, first published in 1999, was recently reissued in a handsome trade paperback edition. It is astonishing in how much pain and sorrow and hope and prayer and righteousness and longing and terror it contains in less than 200 pages, depicting the spread of an unnamed virus through a small town around the time of the Civil War but really depicting what it means to be in the grip of a situation out of the control of mere humans - even as it redefines the very definition of humanity. Is it definitive O'Nan? If not, it's awfully close.
