The Thanatos Syndrome

The Thanatos Syndrome is a science fiction book by Walker Percy. First published in 1987, the book takes place in an alternate-1990s where scientists uncover a substance that promises to reform human behavior. The question raised by the novel is whether it’s ever appropriate to change human nature, even if humanity seems hopeless. The Thanatos Syndrome is a bestseller, and it’s Percy’s last work of fiction. Percy, who died in 1990, was a critically acclaimed American writer. He’s best known for his book, The Moviegoer, which critics lauded as one of the best books published in the English language in the 20th century.

The novel’s protagonist is a man called Dr Thomas More. Dr More is a lapsed Catholic who spends more time studying human behavior than worshipping God. He’s a well-known psychiatrist who specialises in picking apart the human condition. Most significantly, Dr More has a criminal record.

When the novel begins, Dr More’s just been released from a local prison. He’s served a two-year term for distributing drugs to truckers. The truckers needed the drugs, amphetamines, to stay awake during long and gruelling drives, and Dr More thought it was better to give them drugs than leave them falling asleep behind the wheel.
Dr More leaves prison and returns to his home in Louisiana. He resumes working again almost immediately, but he feels like he’s living in a parallel universe. Everyone’s acting strangely, and he can’t explain who his patients are anymore. The people who visit Dr More often need counseling for panic attacks, anxiety, depression, and OCD. However, they all seem content, happy, and well-adjusted.



Dr More notices something else odd about his patients—they have genius IQs now. They have perfect reading scores, impeccable recall, and the ability to solve complex mathematical equations. What’s more, they’re sexually insatiable, and they’re all engaging in wild new sexual experiences.

Although his patients can ace IQ tests, they can barely string two sentences together. Their speech is robotic and deliberate, and they use very few words at a time. Dr More struggles to communicate with them because he feels like he’s talking to monkeys. It’s not long before he loses his patience and decides to investigate these strange occurrences on his own.

Dr More approaches someone he thinks he can trust called Bob Comeaux. Bob is a distinguished psychiatrist at a local hospital, and he’s very conservative in his treatment plans. Dr More respects him because he knows that, despite their differences, they both care about their patients.



Bob thinks that Dr More should be in the hospital because he sounds paranoid. Dr More, however, suspects that Bob’s hiding something. He discovers that the hospital euthanizes babies under 18 months old if the parents don’t want it, because infanticide is legal in this world now. He also learns that Bob undertakes strange experiments which aren’t legal yet.
Dr More keeps pressing Bob for answers, and Bob admits that Dr More is right. Bob and his team have been dumping sodium isotopes into Dr More’s local water supply. These isotopes contain unsafe and potentially toxic salt levels. Dr More once researched heavy salt levels and discovered that it makes humans drowsy and affects their speech. He can’t understand why Bob would deliberately poison the water supply like this.

Bob explains that he’s conducting a social experiment on Dr More’s town. He says that Dr More’s town experiences high levels of crime, drugs, teenage pregnancy, and mental health problems. Thanks to drugging the water supply, everyone behaves properly and there’s virtually no crime. Bob admits that the government doesn’t know about his experiment, but he trusts Dr More to keep his mouth shut until he runs more tests.

Dr More doesn’t know what to do. He’s torn between turning Bob over to the authorities and seeing how the experiment plays out. He is a scientist, after all. He steps into the background until he decides what the best course of action is. In the meantime, he tries to get his life back on track. He decides to go back to church.



Back at church, Dr More speaks with the priest, Fr. Simon Rinaldo Smith. Fr. Smith is an alcoholic who looks after the terminally ill, including AIDS patients. He’s very liberal and he believes in forgiving all sinners. When Dr More tells him what’s happening, he’s disturbed. He doesn’t believe we have the right to interfere with freewill, even if it eradicates crime. If Dr More won’t stop Bob, then he will.

Dr More agrees to stop Bob before he hurts anyone else. He tries to dismantle the sodium pipeline on his own, but the police arrest him for tampering. They threaten to put him back in jail, but Dr More tells them what’s happening to the water supply. Dr More finally convinces Bob to stop the sodium pipeline when he forces him to ingest the poisoned water. Bob sees how dangerous the sodium experiment is and he pulls the plug on the pipeline. Everything returns to normal.