A mysterious sleeping sickness hits a small town in California. This is the first act of an apocalyptic novel that doesn’t quite get off the ground, or at least, doesn’t get off the ground in the way I have come to expect from an apocalyptic novel. I couldn’t put this down and read the whole thing in two days because I was excited to see what happened.  I picked it up to begin with because the front cover has praise from Emily St. John Mandel, the writer of “Station Eleven,” an excellent apocalyptic novel. That might have prejudiced me though. […]