Coronavirus Psyop Gives Sales Boost For 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.”

Publishers report sales boom in novels about fictional epidemics | The Guardian