The key to this problem is the part of the sentence after the colon, and “fatalistic” is the most important word. Fatalism is the belief that all events are predestined, so fatalistic is related to the inevitable, so the correct answer is C.
If you don’t know what fatalism means, you can answer this one by
elimination. Any plague story would not be described with “eccentricity”
(oddness) or “excitement,” so you can eliminate those two. Tedium
(like a long-winded monotony) doesn’t really seem to fit with plague either.
Mystery seems a little more reasonable, so you can narrow it down to two.