The chillingly accurate story of what happens when an unknown flu-like virus hits the Western world. It's all there – the masks, the lockdown, politicians in denial ... The only thing it didn't predict was that the virus would have the name of a Mexican beer.
By the author of A Year in the Merde and 1000 Years of Annoying the French.
A dark comedy about the start of a pandemic, told by the fatally naive Bernie Bridges, who dodges between a glamorous government minister, a depressed female police inspector, and a deadly (but weirdly immune) French model as he tells us how he's avoiding the corpses, corruption and accusations flying all around him.
Coma, the company that Bernie helped to create, began as a medical students' online community, but has since evolved into an agency that puts doctors (even those that have been struck off) in touch with employers, and patients and hospitals in touch with affordable medical practitioners ("surgeons might not speak English, but the patients will be under anaesthetic, so who needs conversation?"). Dubiously sourced medicines, and even vital organs, are also available via Coma ("kidney for sale, hardly used, one careful previous owner").
The novel begins as Coma is to be bought out by a pharmaceuticals multinational called Nostrum, which has come up with a miraculous vaccine to a new "flu" virus. All of Coma's founders, including Bernie, are about to get very rich. Bernie rushes to share his joy and astonishment with his colleague and closest friend, Beano. Sadly, he finds Beano lying dead ... And the novel immediately becomes a race against time, against sudden death, against corruption, and incidentally against affordable, universal health care.
Death Goes Viral is a knockabout comedy, but it is also a serious novel that depicts a government using fake news and false promises to manipulate public opinion during a virus outbreak, and a massive corporation trying to get a stranglehold on the planet's health. It is about trying to distinguish, in a world where everyone communicates to everyone else all the time, between your "friends" and your friends.