Quarantine 3; an ending we won't forget for good or bad.

Picking up and reading QUARANTINE: THE BURNOUTS, the third book in the series, is a different experience now than it would have been a few months ago. A novel where a deadly virus and a quarantine figure prominently in the plot resonates strongly in the middle of real life global pandemic where such terms are mentioned on every news broadcast 24 hours a day, not to mention the ways it has impacted the daily life of everyone. For me, it made the plight of the characters real in a way that was absent when I read the first two books, their fear and despair more palpable. Of course the parallel between real life and the dystopian world depicted in this YA series is tenuous at best, but there is no denying that reading the third book was a unique experience compared to the first two.

The QUARANTINE series is one of those teen dystopia epics where a group of kids are isolated from the rest of the world without adult supervision, and forced to fend for themselves. The results are THE LORD OF THE FLIES on steroids. In this series, the catalyst is one of those pesky laboratory manufactured viruses that exists solely in fiction, one which gets loose and infects the student population of a suburban Colorado high school, said virus being deadly to anyone who has passed puberty. The school is sealed off from the outside world, and the kids are on their own. The social hierarchy of high school, so hallowed in pop culture for decades, becomes a dictatorship, as cliques become gangs that prey upon one another, and bullies terrorize those perceived as weak. The books center around a few “nice” kids who want to do nothing more than stay alive until they “graduate.”


The third book in the series, subtitled THE BURNOUTS, picks up right where the second book left off, with brothers Will and David reunited outside the school after Will was forced to leave or succumb to the virus, which makes its victims cough their lungs out. Lucy, the girl both boys love, is still trapped within the halls of McKinley High, and is now an outcast. Through a plot complication, both brothers don gas masks and re-enter the school to rescue Lucy, risking instant death if they should breathe the same air as any of the infected students. Meanwhile, Hillary, an uber Mean Girl and David’s former girlfriend, has taken control of the school and she wants revenge on Lucy for a past humiliation. The plot is derivative, and many of the characters are nothing more than “types” found in any teen drama, but I found myself invested in Will, David, and Lucy, and their plight, and cared what happened to them. About half way through, I had a hunch as to where the story was going, and I was proven right. There is a bittersweet resolution that might leave some in tears, but it felt earned. Some readers are surely going to be disappointed at the ending, but this has been a series that has not been afraid to go dark, reveling in it at times, and I felt the finale was true to what came before, even if it is very cruel to a character most readers have come to love. This third book has slightly less gore than the second, and that is not a bad thing. But there are a couple of gross scenes that will make readers wince. The author, Lex Thomas, is the pen name for two collaborators, and they have done a good job in giving us one the better Teen Dystopias, a subgenre that includes THE HUNGER GAMES, and my favorite, the GONE, series by Michael Grant. They’ve wisely wrapped up the story of McKinley High with the third book, as this particular arc has used up all the gas in its tank, although there is a fourth book taking up the story of a supporting character.

I wonder how “viral apocalypse” stories, like the QUARANTINE series, will fare in a world where we have come uncomfortably close to the real thing. Are they no longer the escapist fiction we once craved, or are they a way to deal with very real fears? Time will tell, but I am thinking about picking up that unabridged copy of Stephen King’s THE STAND that has been on my book shelf for too long.

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