4 ideas
As Shen Fever empties Manhattan, Candace Chen stays on at Spectra, the publisher where she oversees Bible production outsourced to printers in China. She accepts a contract to remain in the deserted office, commutes through a dying city, and keeps posting photos to her NY Ghost blog until she finally leaves to join a band of survivors. Her routine differs from the fevered only in that she is conscious of it.
Shen Fever does not make its victims violent. It locks them into repeating familiar actions forever: setting a dinner table, folding clothes, trying on outfits in a store, until their bodies decay. The disease makes literal what habit already does, which is keep a life running with no one steering it.
Candace's job is to coordinate cheap production in Shenzhen factories, where workers handle toxic materials and fungal spores. The novel argues that the comfort and affordability of Western consumer goods depend on keeping this harm distant and out of sight, until it is not.
In the novel, triggering memories can tip the infected into fever, and the survivors' leader Bob raids malls and homes for supplies while enforcing rigid rituals of his own. The book treats longing for the past, whether an immigrant's memory of home or a consumer's attachment to familiar things, as capable of trapping a person in a loop. Read this way, the line between the fevered and the survivors is one of degree.