Publishers report sales boom in novels about fictional epidemics
“What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves,” wrote Albert Camus in La Peste (The Plague), his 1947 novel about of how a deadly plague devastates a quarantined town.
More than 70 years later, the global threat of the coronavirus is sending today’s readers towards novels about epidemics in droves. Publishers around the world are reporting booming sales of books including La Peste, as well as Stephen King’s The Stand and Dean Koontz’s “frighteningly relevant” The Eyes of Darkness, which has become the subject of conspiracy theories online owing to its prescience.
The 1981 novel about a fictional virus called “Wuhan-400” – “China’s most important and dangerous new biological weapon in a decade” – leapt into third place in Amazon’s charts this week after a description of the illness was widely shared online. Ebook sales are up by an extraordinary 3,000% in just three weeks, according to the publisher Headline, which credited Koontz’s “extraordinary imagination and masterful storytelling”.
One online reviewer wrote: “It coincides with events happening today to a spooky degree and made my blood turn to ice in my veins.” Another said: “How could a writer possibly know about manmade viruses in 1981 that are now killing people in the same way that is described in this book? A great read but totally baffled.”
Camus’s The Plague follows the inhabitants of Oran, an Algerian town that is sealed off by quarantine as it is ravaged by bubonic plague. Penguin is rushing through a reprint of its English translation to meet demand, but said on Thursday it had sold out of stock on Amazon. The publisher added that sales in the last week of February were up by 150% on the same period in 2019.
Sales of the book have tripled in Italy, reported the literary magazine ActuaLitté, putting it in the country’s top 10 bestsellers. Sales of The Plague have also risen sharply in France, according to the French books statistics website Edistat, peaking at more than 1,600 copies sold in the last week of January – an increase of around 300% on the previous year.
“Although it’s usually considered as an allegory for the French experience of Nazi occupation during the second world war, it couldn’t be more relevant to the current moment,” said Penguin classics’ editorial director, Jess Harrison.
King’s The Stand, which imagines a world decimated by a superflu known as “Captain Trips”, was also being snapped up by readers: the publisher Hodder said its online sales were up 163% since Monday, with ebook sales up by 58%.
The interest in fictionalised takes on epidemics has been mirrored in other forms of entertainment. A 2012 strategy video game, Plague Inc, has reported a huge leap in players, and Warner Bros has reported that its 2011 film Contagion, a Steven Soderbergh movie about a pandemic, had risen from 270th in December 2019 to second on its most watched list. The film is currently ranked at No 13 in the US and No 18 in the UK on Apple’s rental charts.