The essay below examines the book's central themes of morality, isolation, and the blurred lines between safety and monstrosity.

: The use of insects (Singers) as vectors grounds the horror in a plausible, if amplified, biological reality. Reviews - How We Became Wicked | The StoryGraph

: Being "Vexed" requires surviving a process that killed most of an entire generation, framing immunity as a survivor's guilt.

The novel How We Became Wicked by Alexander Yates is a haunting dystopian exploration of humanity’s survival in the face of an insect-borne plague that turns the infected into politely murderous "wickeds".