Zombie Zombie Zombie (Monday)
Sep. 27th, 2010 05:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustIf after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not? let us then eat and drink; for tomorrow we die.
It occurs to me that I’ve finished a surprising amount of books over the last little while, and that many of those books have been about/involved various sorts of zombies. Which makes sense, since zombies really are the primary Millennial monster--living dead with a side-order of apocalypse, or vice versa. Possible a fin-de-siecle hold-over, but it does finally seem to be giving rise to an interesting spectrum of variants, as the titles listed below show:
The Passage, Justin Cronin
Dust, Joan Frances Turner
Feed, Mira Grant
One, Conrad Williams
Boneshaker, Cherie Priest
The Reapers are the Angels, Alden Bell
Interestingly enough, five out of the six come with a female protagonist attached, which used to be rare, but increasingly isn’t. I suppose it makes “sense” with The Reapers are the Angels, which is apparently being sold as YA, a very female character- and author-centric market; I’m not sure I’d go there personally, though, since it strikes me a bit like trying to sell The Road as being “for children” just because it has a kid in it. Shit, by those standards, One is “YA”.
(And yeah, I know that The Passage is supposedly about vampires, but I wanted to get it out of the way, and Cronin’s vampires act a lot more like zombies, anyhow--they’re ravening and uncommunicative, telepathic yet utterly alien, a hive-mind of master-vampire personality imprinted on every subsequent victim. Plus, the book is far more concerned with the post-apocalyptic society that springs up after the initial dumb-ass “hey! Let’s give a bunch of death-row inmates [plus one control-group orphan] Mayan bat-god blood, and see what happens!” experiment breaks its bounds, and that’s good, because the mechanics of the monsters themselves are obviously really not Cronin’s primary focus, shall we say.)
Cronin’s been getting a lot of press for simply being an undeniably good writer slumming in the dirty pits of genre, since (as we all received-wisdom “know”) mainstream horror usually doesn’t rate more-than-adequate prose. Myself, I think the people who genuinely believe that load of hooey are thinking of thrillers, not horror, but wha’ever. For me, The Passage has the defining problems of something designed to be entry one in a trilogy (I hope...Jesus!)--things go like gangbusters ‘til maybe 70% of the way through, at which point you realize: “Oh shit, there’s no way this is going to end A) well or B) at all within the remaining page-age.” And before you chime in, yes, I know I’m guilty of this myself--doesn’t mean I approve of it.;)
Secondary problems include his supposed protagonist being more of a plot device, a genuine Magical Negro character who keeps popping up and acting as Deus ex Machina, and the complete disappearance of another character we spend the entire first section of the book bonding with, which makes the “bravery” of having an almost hundred-year jump between parts one and two look more like Cronin just couldn’t figure out what to do with the dude.
Dust, a first novel, is a promising, amusing, literally spectacular yet ultimately unsatisfying story told from the point of view of Jessie, a full-on risen living dead girl, who thinks "zombie" is a racist term, but calls every pre-mordant she runs across a "piece of hoo [for 'human'] shit". Jessie's lurching grounds are the woods of Calumet County, Indiana; since waking up after the car crash which killed her and her parents, she's been part of the undead gang known as the Fly-by-Nights, and spends her time hunting (mostly animals, or whatever meat's freshest), talking over ultra-old times with all-but-skeletal "duster" Florian (who dates back to the Civil War) or crushing on maggoty "rotter" Joe (a walking insect-farm in a black leather jacket who claims to have died in the 1950s). It's a repetitious, tenuous parody of life, but at least now she has a new "family" around her, she won't have to die alone (again).
At a certain point, we realize that Jessie’s bloated, stinking world is changing--though the dead have been intermittently rising in certain areas for centuries, hoos are now getting sick (horribly), and walking corpses are getting “better” (briefly). The fact that these events coincide with Jessie reconnecting with Jim and Lisa, her pre-mordant siblings, soon turns out to be no coincidence, especially once we learn that Jim has been working for the local Thanatic Studies Institute. But what initially seems like a promising meditation on what sort of dead really is better eventually degrades into a demonstration of entropy at work; Jessie is the sort of character who knows very specifically what she doesn’t want, but has no idea what she does. and that gets wearing.
In Feed’s world, like Dust’s, resurrection is not just a given, but an inevitability--Mira Grant gets big props out the gate for having the best explanation I’ve ever seen for exactly how a zombie plague virus might happen/work (a combination of two viruses that interact with unseen side-effects, both engineered to “cure” other viruses, and thus deliberately made as infectious as humanly possible). So there’s an amazing amount of time devoted to testing viral levels in the characters’ blood, routine and extensive security checks, the idea that you can (for example) have infected body-parts without being outright zombified yourself, etc.
So. That’s all well and good, and (for the most part) an entertaining read--but where the book falls down for me in on two subsequent platforms: First off, it’s about something I find unutterably boring--politics. Specifically, a presidential campaign that our protags get the nod to cover as bloggers, which is the second problem; in Grant’s necessarily shut-in post-plague world, bloggers (who all have cutesy trade-names for the various types of blogging they do, like “Irwins” [who constantly throw themselves into zombie-wrangling danger] and “Fictionals” [who, as far as I can see, spend their online time writing really emo poetry]) are both the backbone of the stay-at-home newsfeed and proud outsiders who feel hilariously ambivalent about working for the Man, man, considering that everything they do seems aimed at driving their hit-counts higher.
Maybe this is a generational thing, but the idea of the few, the proud, the blogging just seems...silly to me, a combination of sad ego-boo and total misunderstanding of your own basic relevance in the grand scheme of things; when I think about all the stuff likeliest to go straight out the window if and when the dead start jumpin’, Net Culture is pretty much top of the list. It thus only gets progressively more silly as the book ekes on and the stakes get higher, not least because the politics plot’s Big Twist is A) not much of a twist and B) signaled so overtly it’s basically visible from space by the law of conservation of characters alone, while the emotional plot’s Big Twist A) is not much of a twist if you’ve seen any zombie movie ever and B) sounds so much better as an idea than in execution, I cannot possibly tell you.
In One, meanwhile, a deep-sea underwater oil rig welder named Richard Jane survives some unspecified disaster which renders the U.K. a radiation-blasted heath full of corpses, the occasional survivor and horrifying mutant creatures called Skinners. Jane starts literally walking home, stubbornly trying to make it back to his wife and son (both probably long-dead), and picking up a crew along the way which eventually boils down to a substitute wife and son--the set-up for fresh disaster inside a disaster, in other words. Bad things happen, described in excruciating existential detail. I would never dismiss either Williams himself (who I consider one of the best writers operating in my chosen field, as well as a great guy;)) or the novel (which recently won the British Fantasy Award in its own category) outright, but for me, this was a hard go that eventually became all-but-impassable. Put it down to motherhood having made me a weenie.
Boneshaker is more of a pulp steampunk thriller with zombies thrown in on top--the story of Briar Wilkes Blue, engineer, daughter to a legendarily good man and wife to a legendarily bad one, who follows her son into the extremely bad part of town on a crazy quest to find out if his father--inventor of the famous titular drilling machine, which plunged straight through the middle of downtown Seattle and released a pocket of zombie-making poisonous gas from beneath the earth, might still be alive. Though not exactly “fun”, Briar’s a great character--reticent, smart and unstoppable, but with a very Clint Eastwood inability to communicate her desperation, vulnerability and love to the people who most need to know about it. Still, the narrative has a very simple trajectory (in and down, up and out), and Priest plays some games with mistaken identity and withheld information that seem a bit unnecessary, in hindsight.
At any rate: Though all of these books are full of varying levels of energy and invention, the one I liked best overall was definitely The Reapers..., which has a demented Cormac McCarthy/Flannery O’Connor vibe, and (at barely 225 pages) moves like a zombie-infested city on fire. At fifteen, Sarah Mary Williams, aka Temple, has never known a world that wasn’t full of “meatskins”; she can take care of herself, and says she aspires to do nothing but, but keeps drifting into dicey situations which tweak her long-dormant moral centre. Again, like Briar, she has a definite Clint Eastwood thing going on--I’ve rarely come across a (book) narrative in which the female main character’s arc was about learning to accept her own destructive potential, but this is the story of Temple’s life: She careens from disaster to disaster, dodging mutants, zombies, fellow survivors with bad on their mind and the similarly violent yet code-driven Moses Todd, who’s sworn to kill her for killing his would-be rapist brother, even though he himself readily admits the guy was just no good.
The landscape Bell describes is mythic yet palpable, and his use of established tropes never falters--I’m particularly pleased with the way he manages Maury, who’s one of those characters I’ve become (surprisingly!) attuned to in such tales: An extremely non-functional adult autistic that Temple ends up going very far out of her way for, knowing the quest they’re on will probably be both useless and fatal. Much as I like The Stand‘s Tom Cullen, I’m just as happy to see that Maury never grows or changes under Temple’s guidance, and that his presence on the scene doesn’t exactly convert her to the ways of hugging and caring, either. She simply does for him out of a fierce idea of what’s right, even while sensing in her gut that nothing good will come of it, because she’s capable of what he isn’t; almost heroic, when you think about it. And very much worth your time.
All right, there we go. Now my back hurts, so I'm going to lie down.
It occurs to me that I’ve finished a surprising amount of books over the last little while, and that many of those books have been about/involved various sorts of zombies. Which makes sense, since zombies really are the primary Millennial monster--living dead with a side-order of apocalypse, or vice versa. Possible a fin-de-siecle hold-over, but it does finally seem to be giving rise to an interesting spectrum of variants, as the titles listed below show:
The Passage, Justin Cronin
Dust, Joan Frances Turner
Feed, Mira Grant
One, Conrad Williams
Boneshaker, Cherie Priest
The Reapers are the Angels, Alden Bell
Interestingly enough, five out of the six come with a female protagonist attached, which used to be rare, but increasingly isn’t. I suppose it makes “sense” with The Reapers are the Angels, which is apparently being sold as YA, a very female character- and author-centric market; I’m not sure I’d go there personally, though, since it strikes me a bit like trying to sell The Road as being “for children” just because it has a kid in it. Shit, by those standards, One is “YA”.
(And yeah, I know that The Passage is supposedly about vampires, but I wanted to get it out of the way, and Cronin’s vampires act a lot more like zombies, anyhow--they’re ravening and uncommunicative, telepathic yet utterly alien, a hive-mind of master-vampire personality imprinted on every subsequent victim. Plus, the book is far more concerned with the post-apocalyptic society that springs up after the initial dumb-ass “hey! Let’s give a bunch of death-row inmates [plus one control-group orphan] Mayan bat-god blood, and see what happens!” experiment breaks its bounds, and that’s good, because the mechanics of the monsters themselves are obviously really not Cronin’s primary focus, shall we say.)
Cronin’s been getting a lot of press for simply being an undeniably good writer slumming in the dirty pits of genre, since (as we all received-wisdom “know”) mainstream horror usually doesn’t rate more-than-adequate prose. Myself, I think the people who genuinely believe that load of hooey are thinking of thrillers, not horror, but wha’ever. For me, The Passage has the defining problems of something designed to be entry one in a trilogy (I hope...Jesus!)--things go like gangbusters ‘til maybe 70% of the way through, at which point you realize: “Oh shit, there’s no way this is going to end A) well or B) at all within the remaining page-age.” And before you chime in, yes, I know I’m guilty of this myself--doesn’t mean I approve of it.;)
Secondary problems include his supposed protagonist being more of a plot device, a genuine Magical Negro character who keeps popping up and acting as Deus ex Machina, and the complete disappearance of another character we spend the entire first section of the book bonding with, which makes the “bravery” of having an almost hundred-year jump between parts one and two look more like Cronin just couldn’t figure out what to do with the dude.
Dust, a first novel, is a promising, amusing, literally spectacular yet ultimately unsatisfying story told from the point of view of Jessie, a full-on risen living dead girl, who thinks "zombie" is a racist term, but calls every pre-mordant she runs across a "piece of hoo [for 'human'] shit". Jessie's lurching grounds are the woods of Calumet County, Indiana; since waking up after the car crash which killed her and her parents, she's been part of the undead gang known as the Fly-by-Nights, and spends her time hunting (mostly animals, or whatever meat's freshest), talking over ultra-old times with all-but-skeletal "duster" Florian (who dates back to the Civil War) or crushing on maggoty "rotter" Joe (a walking insect-farm in a black leather jacket who claims to have died in the 1950s). It's a repetitious, tenuous parody of life, but at least now she has a new "family" around her, she won't have to die alone (again).
At a certain point, we realize that Jessie’s bloated, stinking world is changing--though the dead have been intermittently rising in certain areas for centuries, hoos are now getting sick (horribly), and walking corpses are getting “better” (briefly). The fact that these events coincide with Jessie reconnecting with Jim and Lisa, her pre-mordant siblings, soon turns out to be no coincidence, especially once we learn that Jim has been working for the local Thanatic Studies Institute. But what initially seems like a promising meditation on what sort of dead really is better eventually degrades into a demonstration of entropy at work; Jessie is the sort of character who knows very specifically what she doesn’t want, but has no idea what she does. and that gets wearing.
In Feed’s world, like Dust’s, resurrection is not just a given, but an inevitability--Mira Grant gets big props out the gate for having the best explanation I’ve ever seen for exactly how a zombie plague virus might happen/work (a combination of two viruses that interact with unseen side-effects, both engineered to “cure” other viruses, and thus deliberately made as infectious as humanly possible). So there’s an amazing amount of time devoted to testing viral levels in the characters’ blood, routine and extensive security checks, the idea that you can (for example) have infected body-parts without being outright zombified yourself, etc.
So. That’s all well and good, and (for the most part) an entertaining read--but where the book falls down for me in on two subsequent platforms: First off, it’s about something I find unutterably boring--politics. Specifically, a presidential campaign that our protags get the nod to cover as bloggers, which is the second problem; in Grant’s necessarily shut-in post-plague world, bloggers (who all have cutesy trade-names for the various types of blogging they do, like “Irwins” [who constantly throw themselves into zombie-wrangling danger] and “Fictionals” [who, as far as I can see, spend their online time writing really emo poetry]) are both the backbone of the stay-at-home newsfeed and proud outsiders who feel hilariously ambivalent about working for the Man, man, considering that everything they do seems aimed at driving their hit-counts higher.
Maybe this is a generational thing, but the idea of the few, the proud, the blogging just seems...silly to me, a combination of sad ego-boo and total misunderstanding of your own basic relevance in the grand scheme of things; when I think about all the stuff likeliest to go straight out the window if and when the dead start jumpin’, Net Culture is pretty much top of the list. It thus only gets progressively more silly as the book ekes on and the stakes get higher, not least because the politics plot’s Big Twist is A) not much of a twist and B) signaled so overtly it’s basically visible from space by the law of conservation of characters alone, while the emotional plot’s Big Twist A) is not much of a twist if you’ve seen any zombie movie ever and B) sounds so much better as an idea than in execution, I cannot possibly tell you.
In One, meanwhile, a deep-sea underwater oil rig welder named Richard Jane survives some unspecified disaster which renders the U.K. a radiation-blasted heath full of corpses, the occasional survivor and horrifying mutant creatures called Skinners. Jane starts literally walking home, stubbornly trying to make it back to his wife and son (both probably long-dead), and picking up a crew along the way which eventually boils down to a substitute wife and son--the set-up for fresh disaster inside a disaster, in other words. Bad things happen, described in excruciating existential detail. I would never dismiss either Williams himself (who I consider one of the best writers operating in my chosen field, as well as a great guy;)) or the novel (which recently won the British Fantasy Award in its own category) outright, but for me, this was a hard go that eventually became all-but-impassable. Put it down to motherhood having made me a weenie.
Boneshaker is more of a pulp steampunk thriller with zombies thrown in on top--the story of Briar Wilkes Blue, engineer, daughter to a legendarily good man and wife to a legendarily bad one, who follows her son into the extremely bad part of town on a crazy quest to find out if his father--inventor of the famous titular drilling machine, which plunged straight through the middle of downtown Seattle and released a pocket of zombie-making poisonous gas from beneath the earth, might still be alive. Though not exactly “fun”, Briar’s a great character--reticent, smart and unstoppable, but with a very Clint Eastwood inability to communicate her desperation, vulnerability and love to the people who most need to know about it. Still, the narrative has a very simple trajectory (in and down, up and out), and Priest plays some games with mistaken identity and withheld information that seem a bit unnecessary, in hindsight.
At any rate: Though all of these books are full of varying levels of energy and invention, the one I liked best overall was definitely The Reapers..., which has a demented Cormac McCarthy/Flannery O’Connor vibe, and (at barely 225 pages) moves like a zombie-infested city on fire. At fifteen, Sarah Mary Williams, aka Temple, has never known a world that wasn’t full of “meatskins”; she can take care of herself, and says she aspires to do nothing but, but keeps drifting into dicey situations which tweak her long-dormant moral centre. Again, like Briar, she has a definite Clint Eastwood thing going on--I’ve rarely come across a (book) narrative in which the female main character’s arc was about learning to accept her own destructive potential, but this is the story of Temple’s life: She careens from disaster to disaster, dodging mutants, zombies, fellow survivors with bad on their mind and the similarly violent yet code-driven Moses Todd, who’s sworn to kill her for killing his would-be rapist brother, even though he himself readily admits the guy was just no good.
The landscape Bell describes is mythic yet palpable, and his use of established tropes never falters--I’m particularly pleased with the way he manages Maury, who’s one of those characters I’ve become (surprisingly!) attuned to in such tales: An extremely non-functional adult autistic that Temple ends up going very far out of her way for, knowing the quest they’re on will probably be both useless and fatal. Much as I like The Stand‘s Tom Cullen, I’m just as happy to see that Maury never grows or changes under Temple’s guidance, and that his presence on the scene doesn’t exactly convert her to the ways of hugging and caring, either. She simply does for him out of a fierce idea of what’s right, even while sensing in her gut that nothing good will come of it, because she’s capable of what he isn’t; almost heroic, when you think about it. And very much worth your time.
All right, there we go. Now my back hurts, so I'm going to lie down.
