The Thanatos Syndrome (1991) was Walker Percy's last novel before his death. 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.

Allen Pridgen -- in his book, Walker Percy's Sacramental Landscapes (2000) -- reaches some extraordinary depth in his exploration of the "disconnectedness" (TS 8)that the protaganist, 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 (especially MB, 282), 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."

Pridgen points out that it is not just the victims of the chemical additive in the drinking water who are being "impoverished":

"....but also the scientists who victimize and study them. They, including Tom, are enclosed in a lifeless, self-constructed interior world of scientific abstractions that numb them to the realities of the phenomenal world and the flesh-and-blood people in it. All, Percy maintains, are casualties, of a 'century of death'(MCON,120-21), an 'age of thanatos'(TS, 86)."