"The Down Days" is part of a book of new wave of African literature that has sailed across the Atlantic in recent years. There's a lot of real interesting stuff coming from all over these days. What's common about this new wave is that the fantasies seem to be a bit looser. Here, we are treated to a South Africa beset by a laughing plague that begins with giggling and ends in death. Taxi drivers aren't needed so much as gatherers of the dead. The city is filled with orphans and people seeking refuge. There are truthologists as well because of all the conspiracies going around. There are cults. There are thin lines between real and imagined. An orphaned girl named Tomorrow hunts for her missing brother but the records show he expired months earlier. It's a richly imagined world, twisted just a degree from this one. Personally though, this wasn't for me. Somewhere along the line I lost the storyline and lost interest.

A wild ride through a South African society reeling from a highly contagious infectious disease, dead bodies in the streets, pop-up religions, and new belief systems about ghosts and magic. Reminiscent of the novels by Lauren Beukes, The Down Days is a fantasy/dystopian novel with a cast of vividly-imagined characters, lushy detailed settings and scenes, and eye-opening writing about how we think about death, survival, and society.