Much of Tremblay’s previous fiction has been marked by a deliberate ambiguity regarding horrific or supernatural elements, but that is not the case here. The horrors of Survivor Song are presented clearly, directly and to visceral effect. Although the novel’s seeming prescience is largely accidental, it reflects a distinct — and distinctly political — point of view. Tremblay’s world is one in which help and medical resources are 'stretched to the breaking point,' exacerbated by 'a myopic, sluggish bureaucracy' and a president 'woefully unprepared to make the rational, science-based decisions necessary.' So, art and life continue to mirror one another. And horror fiction, as practiced by Malerman, Tremblay and a good many others, continues to serve as a bleak but appropriate vehicle for conveying the dangers and distortions of our increasingly incomprehensible age.
Tremblay is an undeniably skillful writer. The sentences are lean where they need to be, decorative where they need to be. He’s especially good at the creepy stuff ... He knows how to drive the story forward, while affording it a layer of linguistic color that makes the whole affair feel vastly more engaging, despite the fact that the viral-zombie conceit is hardly original ... At 300 high-velocity pages, the tale whizzes along, taking barely more time to read than the events it describes ... Yet one has the feeling that Tremblay is reaching for a bigger audience, and in this regard, he has uneven success. Though appealing, the characters Rams and Natalie are thin and familiar, their friendship lacking much complexity or depth ... Lacking the unpredictable forces of personality, the story can go only so many ways, and many readers will see the end of Tremblay’s novel coming a mile off.
Survivor Song is an eerily relevant horror novel ... Tremblay excels at short, breathless novels that pack a visceral and emotional punch, and Survivor Song is no exception ... Unsettling parallels aside, Survivor Song is a breakneck, frightening test of what two people can overcome.
Survivor Song would have had that same sense of the uncanny, but our timeline caught up with his story ... There is plenty here traditional zombie fans will recognize and enjoy. Tremblay has aspirations far beyond genre tropes, but he also loves a good old-fashioned monster ... Tremblay uses inventive structure to frame his story. Particularly effective is the white space he uses in a climactic scene, space that is full of despair and allows the reader to pause and soak in it.
... a zombie story and a virus story and a disaster story and an intensely personal, focused drama all at the same time ... Quiet. That's what it is. Except for when it is very, very loud. Plodding (which might seem weird for a book with such a compressed time-line) except for when it absolutely is not. It's a ticking-clock action novel that is, at the same time, timeless, like all the clocks have been turned to liquid. It's an outbreak story released in the middle of a global pandemic which, in its awful reality, absolutely dwarfs the fiction contained between the covers, and it's a horror story with no scares because you know (you know) just how bad, how awful, how sad and how bloody it is all going to get before you're through ... None of this is a criticism. These were all deliberate choices. They all work. They all make Survivor Song what it is, which is a claustrophobically small, painfully real novel of everyday horror that feels (sickeningly, depressingly) like it might've been a long-form non-fiction story if things today and yesterday had gone just a little bit differently than they did ... Straight stream-of-consciousness stuff that Tremblay weaves into the wobbly narrative framework that jumps from narrator to narrator, that switches person and tense, that messes with time and convention in ways that feel both jarring and real. What's one of the things that our own crisis has taught us? That time bends and stretches in strange ways. That the apocalypse is, for the most part boring (except when it's not) ... a small horror story. A personal one. A fast and terrible one that is committed beautifully to the page. It goes on, piling banal complication on top of the awful terror of time running out, and crushes you in the most surprising of ways — with a look, a line, a touch, a memory, an inevitability that you saw coming from page 1. It exists in a pandemic world where all choices are bad ones. Where things unravel faster than you can possibly believe. Where happy endings are transactional: they come with a cost. Because Survivor Song isn't a fairy tale. It's a horror story.
Depending on your appetite for plague fiction, the timing of Paul Tremblay’s Survivor Song is either excellent or appalling ... In any other year Survivor Song would be a safely speculative piece of genre fiction: it is Tremblay’s riff on the zombie apocalypse, told with formal playfulness and meta-awareness. In 2020, however, the novel seems disturbingly prophetic ... bleak and violent. It embraces the shock and urgh of mainstream horror and has none of the ambiguity of A Head Full of Ghosts or The Cabin at the End of the World, novels that distinguished Tremblay as a vital new voice in the genre. It is also, however, the author’s warmest and most humane book to date. Eruptions of violence are answered by moments of poignancy.
... so timely, it’s spooky. For a horror writer, what could be better? ... fast-paced yet thoughtful ... Tremblay employs a few conceits --- for example, a prelude, an interlude and a 'postlude' --- that are distinctly presented but don’t actually seem that different narratively from the rest of the novel. Overall, however, the book feels cohesive, and is well-paced and entertaining, if not totally original in concept. Both Natalie and Ramola are strong and interesting characters. Tremblay gives readers just enough of their backstories to flesh them out but doesn’t slow down or burden what is really an action-driven tale of survival. They are the center of the story, and there are few other characters introduced ... an enjoyable and exciting diversion.
By having Ramola remind us time and time again that the infected are not zombies, Tremblay forces us to reckon with the truth that this horror is not supernatural and not beyond the scope of our reality. And, by referencing the meta narrative of a zombie apocalypse, by making references to our own zeitgeist, he imparts the most frightening truth of all: this is not the horror of any possible future in a world that mirrors our own, it is the horror of a possible future in our very own world ... Why does Survivor Song work so hard to keep the reader firmly in the existential terror of the here and now? Is it to scare the shit out of us? It does that, sure. But, no, it’s not horror for horror’s sake, torture porn, an apocalypse narrative. Survivor Song actually gives us a solution, and a wonderfully simple one: refusing the lies we tell ourselves because we think they’re helping us survive, when they’re only isolating us from the gifts of others.
Tremblay is clearly a skilled writer and world-builder, as the words flow smoothly and the book is an easy read. Yet the pace of Survivor Song drags a bit and the story resounds with often used tropes and plot points. In recent years the market has been inundated with books featuring apocalyptic worlds, pandemics, and other catastrophes which hold the ability to completely change life as we know it or end the current civilisation. When tackling such a familiar setting, it is this reader’s belief that the story must add something new to the genre, must bring a fresh take to the landscape. Tremblay’s premise of focusing on the questionable survival of a pregnant woman is compelling; yet the overarching storyline is predictable, leaving the reader with a desire to finish the book in order to confirm their assumptions rather than to find out what might happen next. Similarly, the characters of Ramola and Natalie are likeable enough; however, something is missing. The connection between the characters and the reader is never really solidified enough to fully tug at the heartstrings, to truly invest the reader in the ultimate outcome as a bad situation turns worse ... Despite these reservations, Tremblay has a great following and many readers are sure to appreciate this newest addition to his body of work. Perhaps this reader has just become oversaturated with this particular genre in recent years and therefore found the story to be too formulaic. A reader new to this genre would likely enjoy the tale, find it moving and somewhat anxiety-provoking without being overly frightening.
Tremblay...has earned worldwide acclaim because he is able to seamlessly combine reality with speculative elements, and his newest may be his most prescient yet ... The novel is framed as a folk song, but it is also a song of friendship, love, and hope despite it all. The fast-paced tale is told within a compressed time line, full of dread, violence, panic; and yet, there are also moments of clarity and beauty. Gorgeously written about terrible things, the relatively short Survivor Song is a good choice for fans of pandemic epics like Joe Hill’s The Fireman...and novels that probe themes of friendship, family, and social commentary amidst chillingly realistic horror like Gwendolyn Kiste’s The Rust Maidens or Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians.
...standout thriller from Stoker Award winner Tremblay ... he vividly drawn characters of Ramola and Natalie give the story an uncommon emotional intensity. This is genuinely hard to put down.
Now, in the midst of a real-life health crisis, Tremblay delivers an eerily prophetic story about a mass outbreak of a rage-inducing virus and the havoc that ensues—basically, he's gone full-on Stephen King by way of 28 Days Later. ... A cinematic scope, scenarios grounded in the real world, and a breathless pace make this thriller one of the must-read titles of the summer ... A prescient, insidious horror novel that takes sheer terror to a whole new level.
