Simon Lelic: The Facility

In Simon Lelic’s conspiracy-horror novel The Facility, the British government snatches scores of people off the streets and quarantines them in a secret facility. The official justification is the emergence of a deadly new virus that all the detainees—officially referred to as “patients” by the Margaret Thatcher-esque home secretary, and as “inmates” and “prisoners” by those actually keeping close watch over them—are all “characterized by their high risk behavior and aggressive promiscuity”: gays, intravenous drug users, “as well as several sex workers and their clients.” The Facility combines two recent focus points for public hysteria, AIDS and terrorism—one initially met with government indifference, the other a handy excuse for governmental overreach—and makes the reaction to them a single public-policy nightmare. In the press conference that is practically the only open acknowledgment of what’s going on, the home secretary announces, “I am ashamed to say… it took us years to recognise the extent of the HIV epidemic. By contrast, in response to what could well have become a public-health crisis on a scale even greater than that of HIV/AIDS, we have acted with alacrity and resolve.”