Dead Souls

From acclaimed author Han Song comes the final installment in Yang Wei’s journey through a dystopian hospital system, touching down on the red planet, where more than Yang’s nightmare is reborn.

The Hospital Ship is no more, and Yang Wei awakens to find himself at the mercy of monstrous doctors and the tumult of his own mind. Not helping matters, of course, is the Mars Hospital’s Pool of Dead Souls. A ghastly body of water, it traps people in an endless cycle of treatment, death, and resurrection.

When an unruly band of patients revolts against this suffering, the Hospital descends into chaos, the likes of which have never been seen before. Strident order falls to madness, unfolding in fits and bursts of violence and carnivalesque celebration. The effect is so jarring that Yang Wei begins to question what he can trust to be real—is reality what he sees…or what he thinks?

Told through an absurdist lens, Dead Souls takes sharp twists and turns ever deeper into Yang Wei’s strange world of the grotesque and ambiguous, bringing the Hospital series to its shocking conclusion.

Han Song works as a journalist with Xinhua News Agency and is one of China’s leading science fiction writers. A native of Chongqing, Han earned an MA in journalism from Wuhan University. He began writing in 1982 and has since published numerous volumes of fiction and essays. His novels include The Red Sea, Red Star over America, the Rails trilogy (Subway, High-Speed Rail, and Orbits), and the Hospital trilogy (Hospital, Exorcism, and Dead Souls), which has been described as a new landmark in dystopian fiction. Han is a six-time winner of the Chinese Galaxy Award for fiction and a repeat recipient of the Xingyun Award. His short fiction has appeared in the collections Broken Stars and The Reincarnated Giant, as well as in the anthology Exploring Dark Short Fiction: A Primer to Han Song. An avid reader and traveler, the author has spent time in both the Antarctic and the Arctic. He’s even searched for bigfoot in the forests of central China.