There are the four horsemen of the apocalypse who are actually personified or at least three of them are personified in this book. War is a war correspondent who like wherever she goes war follows within days. Famine is a dietitian who encourages people to eat a ton of super empty calories and encourage people to diet themselves to death. Pestilence took over for pestilence when we invented penicillin. And then there's death who's just a big scary figure who talks in all caps and is not explicitly personified.