What is it about shiny, clean, contemporary New York that inspires writers to evoke it wrecked, dangerous and falling apart? Does a certain sickness settle in at the sight of another branch bank? An anomie at the word “artisanal” or the discovery of an undercover J. Crew? Gotham is expensive, clean, incredibly safe and full of Chipotles. Without anyone quite catching the switch — here’s the fear — rock ’n’ roll has become middle management.

One response is to return to the bombed-out, bankrupt New York of the 1970s, the city’s darkest hour of recent memory. Take Colum McCann’s “Let the Great World Spin” or Garth Risk Hallberg’s forthcoming debut, “City on Fire.” Another is to put a basically current-day New York under siege, politically or otherwise, as in Gary Shteyngart’s “Super Sad True Love Story.” Taylor Antrim — a senior editor at Vogue and the author of a previous novel, “The Headmaster Ritual” — in a sense merges these approaches in his brisk and tightly plotted new novel, “Immunity,” in which today’s New York assumes the wild danger of the New York of the early ’80s. The cocaine is plentiful, the streets dangerous, and an inexplicable, incurable virus haunts every interaction.

That virus is named TX, after the state where the first cases surfaced; it has swept the world just before the novel opens. As a pandemic, TX is interestingly modulated: worse than the Spanish flu, better than the plague. Four percent of the population has been wiped out, but unevenly. Certain towns have vanished; others are injured and unnerved, but whole. The landscape of the novel is recognizable. New York has the High Line (though you don’t want to go there), and Catherine, the main character, has family back in Richmond, Va. Trains still leave Penn Station, connecting one to the other. But superimposed on this world of today is a very believable police state, built in response to the panic that arose during the first TX outbreak. The Department of Health (which seems to have lost its “Human Services” component) has goons all over the country, lazily directing temperature readers at passers-by and responding to any hint of an outbreak with brute violence. A person showing symptoms of the virus is immediately zip-banded and shipped off to quarantine, a.k.a. Newark.

In the middle of this dystopia, life goes on. Catherine needs a job. Her rent is going up. So she turns to a friend of a friend who runs an exclusive concierge service for Wall Street clients needing Uruguayan villas for the weekend, or surprise helicopter rides, or jewelry for their wives or mistresses. This “monkey work” pays badly, but comes with the promise of something greater and — more pressing — health insurance. Catherine has an ominous tickle in her throat.