Fungal Horror / Fungal Hope: The Zombie Apocalypse Narrative in M. R. Carey’s Hungry Plague Duology and Ling Ma’s Severance

By using fungal infection as the cause of global catastrophes and exploring fungal life’s symbolic potentials, M. R. Carey’s Hungry Plague duology (comprising The Girl with All the Gifts [2014] and The Boy on the Bridge [2017]) and Ling Ma’s Severance (2018) expand and reconfigure the conventions of the zombie apocalypse genre. Instead of identifying the cause of human destruction in an abstract external threat, these works highlight humanity’s own complicity in its downfall, particularly through its fixation on constructing and maintaining boundaries of otherness. This fixation leads to postapocalyptic attempts to reproduce the very structural processes that caused the apocalypse—from the violent objectification of nonnormative bodies to the exploitation of racialized third-world labor under global capitalism. In this context, fungi function not merely as a source of horror in the novels but also as a model of becoming with others, inspiring posthuman collaborative survival.