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

  • The flawed hero. Unlike his namesake Thomas More, the physician Dr Tom More “is a far cry from the saint, drinks too much, and watches reruns of M*A*S*H on TV.” Father Smith, the priest he helps, is equally fallible in the book.
  • Existential anxiety. Western medicine cannot cure the ills of its citizens: “The first character you encounter … the woman who lives at the country club and thinks she has everything and yet is in the middle of a panic attack. She is also the last person you encounter ... at the end confronting her anxiety. She is about to listen to herself tell herself something.”