The Fervor

by Alma Katsu

Maybe there was no string. Maybe Richard was right—maybe, like Andy the hotel clerk, she was seeing stories where none existed. Maybe the drive she felt inside to get to the bottom of a mystery was a bad thing, the first warning sign

of a buried madness. It was a fear she usually smothered, that maybe she had inherited a bad gene from the parents she didn’t know, being an orphan. Stories of relatives locked away in asylums that her aunt had hinted at but never told.

Countless lives were wrecked because those in charge caved to a

popular pressure without basis in fact, that was driven purely by emotion. Because policy makers and civic leaders didn’t do what they knew in their hearts and heads was right.

One reason the current wave of hate against Asian Americans strikes a deep chord with me is because for many years during my career as an analyst for the federal government, I followed civil wars, genocides, and mass atrocities. For years I watched other countries weaken and fall apart under waves of baseless propaganda, generally campaigns run by authoritarian thugs who sought to undermine a society by generating an irrational fear of a scapegoat, an “other.”

From the afterword.

The playbook is the same, again and again. Lies, lies, and the willingness of a large part of a population to channel their fear into senseless hatred.

From the afterword

This book was written to hold the mirror of history up to the reality of today, to show that the self-deception we were guilty of in the past is back with a sickening vengeance.

From the Afterword