This is a small companion work to Lock In that consists of a series of short articles, interviews, and soundbites that tell the history of “Haden’s Syndrome,” the fictional disease that left millions of people “locked in”: fully conscious and aware, but unable to move their bodies in any way. It provides a small amount of additional context to the full story, and has a handful of moving scenes, but otherwise, doesn’t add too much.
The format of the story reminded me of World War Z, which is described as an “Oral History of the Zombie War.” Both books consist of a series of glimpses of how the world reacts to a disaster, giving you a wide variety of perspectives, including doctors, politicians, those affected by the disease, scientists, prisoners, and so on. It’s a great format for a global narrative, though the stories in World War Z felt more compelling.
Perhaps part of the reason is that, ironically, World War Z felt a bit more realistic. If you think of “zombie-ism” as a disease, the variety of ways that the countries of the world react to it in that book—denial, civil war, quarantine, religious zealotry, total breakdown, and so on—felt considerably more likely than the cooperative, everyone-work-together, kumbaya reaction in Unlocked. That said, Unlocked did have some moving scenes, especially featuring the president in and the first lady, but I wonder if a more gritty and brutal version of this book would’ve made for better reading?
