THE THANATOS SYNDROME. A Novel

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The Thanatos Syndrome was Walker Percy's last novel. It is a sequel to Love in the Ruins. It tells the story of a former psychiatrist who suspects that something or someone is making everyone in the town crazy and they turn to zombies.
In 1989, Percy stated that, in The Thanatos Syndrome:
"I tried to show how, while truth should prevail, it is a disaster when only one kind of truth prevails at the expense of another. If only one kind of truth prevails -- the abstract and technical truth of science -- then nothing stands in the way of a demeaning of and a destruction of human life for what appear to be reasonable short-term goals."
Critic Allen Pridgen—in his Walker Percy's Sacramental Landscapes —describes the "disconnectedness" that the protagonist, Dr. Tom More, begins to notice in The Thanatos Syndrome:
"Perhaps the single most important idea in Percy's epistemology, expressed again and again in his essays and interviews, is his conviction that this kind of impoverishment in the power to name experience causes a subsequent impoverishment of consciousness and being since it is only through language transactions with others that the self locates who and where it is."