Environmental Conditions In Steven Amsterdam's Things We Didn T See Coming

How do the environmental conditions in Things We Didn’t See Coming set a dark and hopeless tone?
When reading Steven Amsterdam’s “Bold, original and sneakily affecting” novel; Things We Didn’t See Coming readers are made aware of the environmental changes in the dystopian world that Amsterdam presents. As the chapters progress in the novel a different environmental event happens or can be predicted to happen. Although environmental conditions seem to make a world the environmental conditions described in Things We Didn’t See Coming appear to break the world in which they live in. Along with environmental conditions comes change and in this case disaster leaves the people of this time distraught and diverse alternating in a dark and hopeless place to live, or die. As if the natural disasters weren’t hard enough to try and survive through, readers are also made aware that there are pandemics and pestilences going on at the same time. This creates a dark and hopeless
In the chapter “Cakewalk” readers are introduced to a man that has been infected and affected by the plague. The diseased man is described as being “…on all fours, throwing up blood under a tree”. This suggests not only the physical state of the man but it also puts forth the fact that he is alone. Despite readers being unaware of what has happened to this man Amsterdam makes his readers ponder the reason of why this man is alone, how long he has been alone and also whether he was abandoned and left alone because of the plague. It is through dark and hopeless tone that readers are aware that this man does not have long to live, in fact every time the narrator thinks he’s dead he “turns, or coughs or spits”, and of course it is because of the environmental conditions that has given him this horrible condition as well as a death