Covid-19 has made running book clubs which straddle different academic years complex to manage. However, the Psychotronic Book Club has carried on, temporarily morphing into a Year 11 group whilst we are meeting in bubbles. Now in its 15th year, it will take more than a virus to finish off this reading group!
Sticking with the theme of viruses, the book we discussed last Tuesday was Paul Tremblay’s Survivor Song (2020)/ This horror novel, set over a brief nine-hour period, starts two weeks into a highly contagious rabies outbreak which makes people dangerous and violent. Considering it was written a couple of years ago, the plot has uncanny similarities to Covid-19, taking in the issues of lack of PPE in hospitals, a POTUS obsessed with Twitter, and other factors which have been well covered on the news over 2020.
The group of Freya, Maddie, Esme, Emily and Lucy all loved the book and even shed a few tears at some of the sadder moments. These five girls are tremendous readers and huge horror fiction fans, so for our next selection we will be reading Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh, an Argentinian novel published in 2017, which has just been translated into English and has been recently receiving outstanding critical praise and is currently featured in the semi-final stage of the horror section of the Good Reads Annual Awards.
Tony Jones (Senior Librarian & Archivist)