One of Us by Craig DiLouie

Published by Orbit on July 17, 2018

One of Us is an alternate history, set in Georgia in the 1980s. But One of Us is also an allegory. “Folks don’t care about the truth,” one of the characters thinks. “Not when it interfered with a comforting narrative.” And that pretty much sums up America today, a country divided between people who care about the truth and people who dismiss facts as “fake news” because it gets in the way of how they want to perceive the world.

In One of Us, Reagan is president and the B-52s are on the radio, although their songs are a bit different from the ones we know. A plague has infected children. Don’t worry, it isn’t a zombie plague, but it does turn some kids into monsters. At least, that’s what normal people call them. People in the novel who define themselves as normal are white, not well educated, and happy to exploit the plague kids when it comes time to harvest the cotton.

The plague is sexually transmitted. At school, Amy Green is taught the importance of abstinence and safe sex. She’s taught how to get a mandatory abortion if a plague kid makes her pregnant. She’s taught that it’s illegal for someone who carries the plague to have sex, and that it is illegal for anyone to have sex until they’re tested. That saddens Amy because, unbeknownst to all the other kids in her school, she carries the plague germ. So much for Amy’s sex life.

Enoch Bryant is known to the other kids as Dog. He looks kind of like a wolf, with long skinny arms like hairy pipe cleaners. He lives in the Homes as a ward of the state. A million plague kids have been abandoned to the Homes. Some are starting to show special abilities. Some kids who exhibit abilities (like Goof, who finishes other people’s sentences before they’re spoken) are taken away from the Homes to assist government agencies. Dog’s friend George (a/k/a Brain) is a genius, but he hides it. Brain is a born leader, and he intends to lead a revolution.

I view the story is an allegory of racial, ethnic, and religious oppression mixed with an allegory of discrimination against AIDS victims. The older generation praises progressive American values for segregating plague kids in Homes, rather than making them live in the woods or hunting them down like the less civilized European countries, but really the plague kids are slave labor for Georgia farms.

The younger (normal) generation is divided about the plague kids. Some agree with their parents, who benefit from exploiting the kids and see it as part of the natural order. Kids who are naturally rebellious empathize with the plague kids. They don’t view having the plague as a reason to lose freedom or dignity.

Judging from the dialog, pretty much everyone in the novel is a dumb Southern hick, including the teachers. This alternate history is even worse than our current reality, but it may be unfairly heavy-handed in its failure to give a voice to any “normal” adults who might be expected to resist the exploitation and mistreatment of children. Another strike is that the story plods at times, as young characters deal with their relationship angst. I kept wondering, “Is Brain’s revolution ever going to happen, or what?” When the story finally reaches a climax, it feels like an anticlimax.

Still, I like the novel’s message, which builds on Nietzsche’s warning that those who fight monsters must be careful not to become monsters. That’s particularly true when society defines monsters as anyone who happens to belong to a different group. One of Us does a nice job of reminding us that those who claim to be fighting monsters often make the monsters scapegoats for problems of their own making.

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