“Recurring phrases and motifs—like “prepare for the worst,” the mysterious sleeping sickness, or the moral implications of certain diseases—turn [Booker’s] collection into an echo chamber where a sense of impending doom ricochets off the walls. Like a strange collection of symptoms that defies all neat diagnostic categories, these motifs suggest meaning but refuse to be placed in a single coherent framework. The reader is thus forced into the role of a literary hypochondriac and left to wonder: what is imagined? What is real?”