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The Thanatos Syndrome
First edition cover
AuthorWalker Percy
LanguageEnglish
GenreThriller novel
PublisherFarrar Straus & Giroux (HB) & Palandin (PB)
Publication date
1 April 1987
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages372 pp (hardback edition) & 384 pp (paperback edition)
ISBN0-374-27354-5 (hardback edition) & ISBN 0-586-08726-5 (paperback edition)
OCLC14718928
813/.54 19
LC ClassPS3566.E6912 T46 1987
Preceded byLove in the Ruins 

The Thanatos Syndrome (1987) was Walker Percy's last novel. It is a sequel to Love in the Ruins. Set in the near future in Feliciana, it tells the story of an imprisoned psychiatrist who is freed and returns to his town with the active members demonstrating new mysterious behaviors. He suspects that something or someone is making everyone in his town crazy and reversing them to be like primitive apes.

Plot

After two years in prison for selling prescription drugs, Tom More, a Louisiana psychiatrist and lapsed Catholic, comes home to his virtually defunct practice and marriage. He notices that people in his town are different, many of his patients have a strange speech to them. Many faculties are dulled but some are enhanced, particularly memory and sexual appetite.

Teaming up with his cousin Lucy, an epidemiologist who also has an independent mind, they discover that the authorities, a consortium of scientists, have been running secret trials on the population of the town. Through the addition of sodium ions to the water supply, the active population is gradually being made more chimpanzee-like, while the inactive, the old and the sick, are being euthanized. To Tom's particular disgust, the leaders of the trials are found to engage in sexual abuse of children, for which he takes his revenge by forcing them to drink high concentrations of sodium and so that they regress to apes.

A parallel plot involves a Catholic priest, Father Smith, who like Tom has hit rock bottom and almost totally failed in his calling. Together, with difficulty, the two men rediscover the hope hidden in their shaky Catholic faith.

Themes

List of characters

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h Abádi-Nagy, Zoltán (Summer 1987), "The South, Catholicism, semiotics, and linguistics: Walker Percy on the Art of Fiction. No. 97", The Paris Review, vol. Summer 1987, no. 103, retrieved 1 May 2016