All man's toil upon the planet was just so much foam.
— Jack London
In Seattle's Left Bank Books a few years ago, I bought a novel by one of my favorite writers, the left-leaning nihilist and dog-loving Jack London. I took my copy of The Scarlet Plague around the corner and into the Pike Place Starbucks, where I sat on a stool and read the whole of the 60-page book.
First published in 1912, The Scarlet Plague, focusing as it does on man's craven response to pandemic, remains one of modern literature's finest examples of post-apocalyptic storytelling.
Set in a ruined California, the tale takes place 60 years after the 2013 outbreak the "Red Death," a mysterious virus that depopulates the world.
Jim Smith, an eye-witness to the pandemic, recounts to his grandsons how people were gripped by ancestral fear.
"We were sure that the bacteriologists would find a way to overcome this new germ, just as they had overcome other germs in the past,” he tells them. But panic set in when everyone realized “the astonishing quickness with which this germ destroyed human beings, and the fact that it inevitably killed any human body it entered."
Smith describes how the virus infects:
“The heart began to beat faster and the heat of the body to increase. Then came the scarlet rash, spreading like wildfire over the face and body. Most persons never noticed the increase in heat and heart-beat, and the first they knew was when the scarlet rash came out. Usually, they had convulsions at the time of the appearance of the rash. But these convulsions did not last long and were not very severe. The heels became numb first, then the legs, and hips, and when the numbness reached as high as his heart he died.”
Victims' corpses rot instantly, spewing the virus into the air. Pandemonium erupts and terrified citizens flee for safety:
“Imagine, my grandsons, people, thicker than the salmon-run you have seen on the Sacramento river, pouring out of the cities by millions, madly over the country, in vain attempt to escape the ubiquitous death. You see, they carried the germs with them. Even the airships of the rich, fleeing for mountain and desert fastnesses, carried the germs.”
Jim himself panics:
“I caught up my handbag and fled. The sights in the streets were terrible. One stumbled on bodies everywhere. Some were not yet dead. And even as you looked, you saw men sink down with the death fastened upon them. There were numerous fires burning in Berkeley, while Oakland and San Francisco were apparently being swept by vast conflagrations. The smoke of the burning filled the heavens, so that the midday was as a gloomy twilight, and, in the shifts of wind, sometimes the sun shone through dimly, a dull red orb. Truly, my grandsons, it was like the last days of the end of the world."
While you're self-quarantined, mix yourself a Bloody Mary and read The Scarlet Plague.
