A Plague of Immortality

It’s always a thrill when someone reviews your story and zeroes in precisely on the themes and ideas you were looking to explore. My hat’s off to Derek Newman-Stille for this review, where he barely touches on plot and nicely sums up the ideas of immorality, change and conflict through the lens of less-than-ideal small town life.

Speculating Canada: Canadian Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy

A review of Matt Moore’s “Innocence Prolonged, and Overcome” in Lazarus Risen (Bundoran, 2016)

By Derek Newman-Stille

Contagion narratives have been increasingly popular in our fiction, exploring the human fear of the microorganism, a tiny predator that can consume us without being seen. However, what happens when a virus gives us what we think we want? We are also a society who fears ageing, so what if a virus can end ageing?

In Matt Moore’s “Innocence Prolonged, and Overcome”, a contagion named the Grail Virus has spread,, killing the vast majority of people that come into contact with it, but granting immortality to a select few people. Because the virus is deadly to most people, this select group of immortals, frozen at the age of infection, have been cut off from the rest of society, quarantined in a small town.

Moore explores the image that is often projected onto small…

View original post 251 more words