Hirsch, J. (2011). The Eleventh Plague. NY: Scholastic.
As you can tell, I’m a big reader of dystopian fiction (but really, who isn’t these days?), and so when I saw an advertisement for The Eleventh Plague, I knew what book I was going to check out next. Set in an unspecified future United States that has been destroyed by war and a bio-terror weapon that killed over half of the population, Hirsch’s first novel opens with a burial. Stephen, the novel’s fifteen-year-old narrator, and his father–the last remaining members of their family–are burying Stephen’s grandfather who has finally succumbed after years of living rough. Stephen and his father eke out their existence as salvagers who scrounge for and then trade what raw materials they can find for their meager rations. After Stephen’s father is badly injured in a fight with a pack of slavers, Stephen allies himself with a group of settlers who have turned a walled community into a small town called Settler’s Landing.
Hirsch’s novel is divided into sections, each of which describes the “acts” of the story: Act 1: Stephen and his father on the road, Act 2: Stephen and his father in Settler’s Landing, where Stephen’s interest is piqued by a girl who seems to cultivate her outsider status, Act 3: Stephen and the “outsider” play a prank that ends up having larger implications than mere revenge on a rival. Much of the novel consists of Stephen’s own mediations on his situation. Having grown up on the “road,” he has never seen a community like this one and has never had to rely on anyone outside of his own family. The concept of friendship is a difficult one for him, though most of the people of Settler’s Landing attempt to familiarize him with the idea. Following the “prank,” the pace picks up as Stephen finds himself a rogue soldier in a local war.
I wanted to like this book more than I did and I think much of my dislike had to do with the somewhat surface level of the narrative. I found myself wanting the moodiness of the first chapter to be sustained and this wish might have informed my disappointment at what seemed like an abrupt shift in characterization that occurred towards the end of the novel. Hirsch does a fine job of describing the post-apocalyptic landscape and his descriptions of abandoned shopping malls and casinos were some of my favorite parts of the novel. As the novel lingered on these, I was reminded of The World Without Us, and found myself considering the slow destruction the erasure of millions of people could assure in a world built to that enormous scale.