Ron Charles recently wrote in his Washington Post Book Club column – “Tom Perotta’s ‘The Leftovers’ might become U.S. policy,” reminding me of the 2011 novel about an apocalypse with two percent of the world’s population vanishing.

Charles points out the U.S. President has proposed tolerating the death of just one or two percent of us, as he urges the country to go back to work – Trump said: “We lose much more than that to automobile accidents…”

Perotta frames his story around the 98 percent who are left.  Two percent doesn’t seem so large a number; Emily St. John Mandel’s  “Station Eleven”  imagines that a flu kills off 99 percent of the world’s population. Yet, who would volunteer to be one of the millions who are sacrificed for the good of the economy in an election year?

I looked back to my review of The Leftovers in 2011 and am posting it here.  Chilling how fiction mirrors real life.

Review of The Leftovers