Deadline, by Mira Grant

Deadline

I don’t often get to say this, but I think Mira Grant’s Deadline is even better than the first book in this trilogy. While it still has problems with repetition in the prose, it freaked me out (in a good way) more than the first book did. Don’t get me wrong. Feed was great. I read it in one day it was so good. But Deadline runs with the premise set up by the first book, deepens the conspiracy, and ratchets up the terror.

The zombies in this series are the result of two man-made virus (one to cure cancer, the other to cure the common cold) combining into a terrifying new disease. All mammals are susceptible. To make things worse, the disease is mutating, evolving. At the time of the second book, they know about fifteen strains.

The beginning of the book starts about a year after the events of Feed. Shaun Mason is still coping with his loss and seems to have lost his taste for poking dead things with sticks–his previous passion in life. Though Shaun and his team of bloggers got the truth out, the cost appears to have broken him. So when a new conspiracy, potentially more explosive than the one from the first book, lands in his lap, it’s tempting for him to think about passing it by. His sister’s commitment to the truth prevents him. Almost before Shaun decides to investigate, he finds himself in them middle of a man-made outbreak of zombies and an airstrike that takes the life of one if his bloggers.

Shaun and his team spend most of the rest of the book running, crisscrossing the country to find out if what they suspect–that someone is manipulating the deadly zombie virus–is actually true. In Shaun’s world, manipulating the virus and potentially making it worse, is the ultimate taboo. One of the few things that gives the living the upper hand over the dead is the fact that the virus can only transfer through fluids. If it managed to go airborne, humanity might be looking at the end of their species.

It sounds a little pale when you write it down in bald sentences, but it’s a lot more gripping when you get it piece by piece as Shaun investigates. And because Grant is the kind of author willing to sacrifice characters like pawns, you never know who’s going to die next. I’ll admit I kept reading partly to make sure my favorites survived to the end of the book. (I’m not going to say if this worked out or not.)

There’s only one book left in this trilogy, due to come out in a couple of months. I have no idea how Grant is going to escalate from the events of Deadline. But if the fact that Deadline is such a great read and seems to suffer from none of the middle volume doldrums, I am very excited to see what happens at last.

Feed, by Mira Grant

Feed

At first, Mira Grant’s Feed struck me as an overstuffed novel. It’s a zombie novel, complete with hordes and close shaves and bullets to the brain. It’s also a conspiracy/political thriller involving a presidential election and assassination attempts. It’s also a commentary on the state of media and journalistic ethics. It’s also just over 600 pages long. There’s a lot going on here.

Fortunately, I didn’t have any big plans today.

Grant quickly introduces us to a world that’s had 20 years to acclimate itself to a zombie virus that strikes no matter how a victim dies. In this world, the zombie virus actually infects everyone. It only goes “live” when the victim is bitten or dies. Everyone is just an accident or a spot of bad luck away from an outbreak. Elaborate security measures have developed to keep everyone as safe as they can be under such circumstances. On this front, Grant has a very serviceable zombie novel. There are a number of thrilling close shaves that keep you on your toes as you read.

Our guide to this world is Georgia Mason, a professional blogger along with her brother and friend. Georgia is prickly and cynical. But her dedication to reporting the truth (and her wicked sense of humor) override any dislike you might have had for her. She’s the conscious and the ethical center of her little cadre. Her brother is usually too busy poking zombies with sticks (sometimes literally) and uploading the live feeds to the internet. And the friend is a technical genius, but a flake when it comes to just about everything else.

Shortly after a fairly spectacular opening involving a motorcycle-assisted escape from a small pack of zombies, Georgia gets word that her group is the first group of professional bloggers exclusively selected to follow a presidential campaign. It’s a big coup for them and lets them go independent. But it becomes clear after a couple of deadly coincidences, that something sinister is going on.

At this point, the zombie plot gives way to the thriller plot somewhat. George and her team try to track down whoever seems to be trying to kill or otherwise destroy their candidate. But when it became clear how deep the rabbit hole goes on this particular conspiracy, I didn’t mind so much that the zombie action died down. In fact, it all leads to a rather terrific conclusion.

I can’t give away any more of the plot without revealing a major plot point. But that major point also makes this book worth the price of admission. If you read this book and get to that point–you’ll know the one I mean–you’ll see how Grants novel suddenly evolves from a workmanlike, but original novel, into one that has startling emotional depth and pathos. I was having a blast up to that point, enjoying all the fights and mystery. But that moment tugged at my heart in a way that I was not expecting.

The other thing this book does is serve, as I said, as a commentary on the state of media. Most people I know distrust the traditional media to a greater or a lesser extent. In my role as a librarian, I try to get more people into that questioning group. In the world Grant created here, no one trust the traditional media because they ignored the first outbreaks as hoaxes or nonsense. Only the bloggers told the truth. As things got worst during those initial outbreaks, the surviving public lost all faith the media and started trusting the bloggers. People learned, the hard way, to triangulate their news. They learned to seek out the news from more than one source. Bloggers eventually get licenses to help regulate them, to make sure they’re not following the route followed by their older siblings on TV and in print. So both journalistic ethics and critical reading also get resurrected. (Sorry about the pun.)

When I first started reading Feed, I wasn’t sure if Grant was going to be able to pull it off. Sure it was interesting, but it was an awful lot of plot (not to mention character development) to cram between two covers. I can point to instances where Grant stumbled. But it all comes together. And, as I said, that bitter moment of pathos near the end elevates this book from the category of “Pretty Good Read” to “Really Great Read” for me.

When She Woke, by Hillary Jordan

When She Woke

I hate to say it, but Hillary Jordan’s When She Woke does not live up to its premise. There’s a blurb on the back that describes it as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter by way of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s pretty accurate in terms of the plot, but the writing style is not up to par to pull it off.

Let’s get the plot out of the way. Hannah Payne (e.g. Hester Prynne) is punished for having an abortion by having her skin turned red by a virus. As Hannah reflects on her punishment, we get more details about her world. It’s America in the future, after a disease destroyed women’s fertility. Evangelists and religious fundamentalists are in charge. Hannah grew up in a very religious home somewhere in Texas. Until she found herself having an affair with a married man and getting pregnant, she never questioned the rules or her beliefs. To protect her lover, she has an abortion and is almost immediately caught. When she refuses to name her lover or her doctor, she is sentences to 30 days in jail at 16 years of being red.

I have to admit it’s a pretty effective punishment. Different kinds of criminals are given different colors, so you can see what someone did on their face. Instead of locking them away, “Chromes” live in ghettos and try to get along as best they can. Once Hannah is released, her father tries to help her by getting her into a halfway house for female Reds. Hannah is almost immediately cast out when she objects to the psychological torture the nutty religious owners inflict on their charges. After that, Hannah falls into a network that can help her get to Canada and get her punishment reversed.

This could have been a very interesting book, even it if does rip off The Scarlet Letter and The Handmaid’s Tale. But there is no subtext to this book. Characters’ emotions and motives are explicitly explained, repeatedly. There’s very little left for the reader to puzzle about or ponder on. Secondly, the backstory is told in such a way that it comes off as a rant more often than not. If this book is meant as satire or allegory, it feels more like a smack upside the head about how religion is evil. Consequently, the people this book should reach will just get pissed off and not read it.

On the plus side, I didn’t take me long to read.

Swan Song, by Robert McCammon

I didn’t realize when I read it, but Stephen King’s The Stand has colored my reading of every man-made apocalypse I’ve read since. When I read The Stand for the first time, it freaked me out so much that I could only read it in 60 page bursts or so before I had to go read something else for a while. It made such an impact on me that I can’t help but compare similar books to it and see if they can measure up. On top of this, it doesn’t help that Robert McCammon’s Swan Song has some very strong similarities to The Stand. Sure, it’s different enough that plagiarism is not a concern, but I couldn’t help but think as I read it: Hey, I’ve seen this sort of thing before.

Swan Song

The beginning of Swan Song is, frankly, terrifying and utterly believable. Written in 1987, it drops you into the middle of escalating tensions between the American government and the Soviets. For me, this was the best part of the book. It was tense and cynical, like Dr. Strangelove without the humor or absurdity. In this opening, we see a president getting backed into a corner by his cabinet. The Soviets have been posturing, which means that–according to that cabinet–we need to grandstand right back. We can’t appear weak. The Soviets only respect strength, etc. etc. The president ends up pushing the button and nuclear war breaks out. The United States is devastated, in the fullest sense of the word. It’s remarkable that anyone survived at all. Even if the explosion and radiation didn’t get you, the subsequent starvation should have.

At the same time McCammon sets the stage, he also starts dropping in hints of the supernatural. He turns it into a slow show down between good and evil. On the evil side, is a creature that the other characters liken to the Devil card in Tarot. All it seems to want is destruction, to stamp out hope. It possesses other characters in order to destroy a girl named Swan–who has a gift for making things grow in impossible conditions. Also on the evil side is a whacked out Vietnam vet and his sidekick, a twisted boy with a penchant for torture. The vet and the kid are out to conquer what’s left of the population Mad Max style. On the good side are Swan and her protectors who, for the most part, don’t have any plan except to survive as long as possible. For most of the book, the protagonists and antagonists circle each other over the wastes of the United States. Most of the action in this book is crammed into the first and last hundred pages or so. The middle is slow, I have to say.

McCammon starts to get heavy handed with his symbolism later in the book with the Job’s Mask phenomenon. The people who get this condition are all out of the ordinary in some way. When their mask falls away, their “real face” is revealed. The beautiful people are Good; the ugly people Evil. Once this starts to happen, McCammon starts to build towards his climax where the Devil (for lack of a better name) wants to unleash one last super weapon. The ending is better than the deus ex machina ending of The Stand, I’ll give McCammon that. Human foibles started the whole mess and humans, on their own, get out of it.

By the end of the book though, I was just glad that I was out of pages. It was an exhausting read. I don’t know If I’d recommend it to anyone except hardcore apocalypse readers, in spite of the awards it won. I’ll stick with The Stand.

The Reapers Are the Angels, by Alden Bell

The Reapers Are the Angels

Alden Bell’s The Reapers Are the Angels reminds me of nothing so much as True Grit with zombies. It’s plain spoken and profound at the same time, anchored by a tough girl who is trying to do the right thing in a violent world. Unlike True Grit, there’s no one to protect and guide Temple. She’s on her own, with a vengeful man on her trail. In that way, it’s sort of True Grit in reverse. With zombies.

We meet Temple in an isolated lighthouse somewhere in the Florida keys. When a zombie (or “meatskin”) washes up on shore, Temple pulls up stakes and returns to the mainland to find a safer place to live. For a fifteen year old girl, however, the living are just as dangerous as the dead. Temple soon runs afoul of Moses Todd, a giant of a man with a lecherous brother. Temple kills the brother in self defense, and Moses starts to chase her all over the ruined Southern landscape.

Temple is not a bad person, though she constantly fears that she is. She questions what is right and wrong. She desperately wants to do what’s right, even if it is hard. For a large portion of the book, she shepherds a mentally challenged man to Texas to try and find his family. But she is constantly put into situations where she must answer with violence. She’s good at it; she’d be the first to admit it. But one comes away with the impression that this is what scares her most of all: her satisfaction with bloody jobs well done. Temple is a born soldier. She just can’t seem to make peace with that. Her bloody jobs haunt her. Her guilt drives her on as much as her need for safety.

I love these ethically thorny books, and not just because they make me wonder what I would do in similar situations. I love ethical dilemmas because they push us to really consider what is right and wrong. I’m pragmatic, and I would argue that ethics–for the most part–have to be decided based on the situation. But Bell uses this book to also look at the repercussions of the decisions, even when they were clearly the right ones in the situation.

This book has great characters and a great plot. But what made me really love it was the language. It’s plain, sure, but Bell is capable of creating beautiful images with it:

She watches the fire and feels sleepy, and when she pokes it with a stick, the embers fly up into the air like a crazy squadron of insects and then simply disappear as if they’ve gotten lodged in one of the many folds of the night. (161*)

Temple twists English a little, creating malapropisms like aerodynastics. But she’s far from stupid. As she points out later in the book, when she should have been in school, she was surviving. She speaks a bit like the characters in Firefly–that’s really the only way I can describe it. But I could read her for hours because I love the way she bends a phrase.

In a way, it’s a shame that the book is so short. This is a rich environment for stories and characters. But on the other hand, if it had been longer it would have been tempting to natter on about guilt and ethics and right and wrong and utterly suck the life out of the book. I can tell that this is a book that rewards multiple readings.

I’m really looking forward to Bell’s next book. He’s the sort of writer that elevates the genre.

* 2010 trade paperback edition.

Who Fears Death, by Nnedi Okorafor

Who Fears Death

Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death is a book that it should have been a lot harder to read, given the subject matter. The author wrote in the afterword that she was inspired–if that’s the right word–by a 2004 article about “weaponized rape” in the Sudan. It’s amazing and horrible to think that such an interesting book could come out of that kind of source material. This book took some serious chutzpah to write, and I have to admire Okorafor’s courage.

The book jacket claims that this book is set in a post apocalyptic Africa, but the land and people are so different that it’s easy to forget that this is supposed to be earth. The protagonist, Onyesonwu, is a mixed race child and the product of rape. While she has unusual talents, everyone except her mother and non-biological father shun her, dislike her, and fear her. Instead of caving to public opinion, Onye grows up brave, strong, and utterly determined to better herself and learn how to use her gifts. Beyond that, she is driven by a terrible need for revenge on her biological father. She learns that that man who raped her mother is organizing a genocide against her mother’s people. With a few friends and the love of her life, Onye sets out west to kill her biological father and stop the Nuru’s plans to wipe out the Okeke.

I wasn’t sure what the purpose of this book was supposed to be at the beginning, but as the plot developed it turned into a kind of inside out gospel. Characters make constant reference to a Great Book, which explains the apocalyptic event in vague, Biblical allegory. If the Great Book is analogous to the Old Testament, there is a prophecy that claims that a great sorcerer is coming to rewrite the book. Onye believes that she is that messiah-like figure. Her travels in the West with her companions (read disciples, but much more human) remind me of parts of the New Testament, but with added wrath and foibles. Even the ending of this book is remarkably similar to the end of the Gospels and the writing style has the same sparse, plain simplicity.

Its subtle, Gospel-like allegory really made the book before me because, without it, I don’t know if I would have made it past the first chapters because of the violence against women and a certain cultural practice that no women should ever suffer. This is going to be a difficult book to recommend to people. This book demands a certain amount of bravery on the reader’s part.

This is a book that demands that you spend a lot of time thinking about it afterward. I finished it yesterday and I know that I’m going to be pondering Who Fears Death‘s lessons. I may have to read it a couple more times in order to get to the bottom of it. Well, I already knew that great books are difficult. In this case, it’s not the plot or the motives that are tricky to parse, it’s the meaning behind it all that’s hard to get at. There aren’t any easy answers in this book, since it seems like all the characters get punished in one way or another. I will say that I hope this book doesn’t disappear. I hope a lot of people read this book and discuss it. It deserves to become a major work.

Beyond Exile, by J.L. Bourne

Beyond Exile

After reading Day by Day Armageddon‘s sequel, Beyond Exile, I feel like I need to watch a comedy or something before I can get to sleep tonight. Reading this book is like playing Left 4 Dead late at night; it freaked me out. I’m really glad that I read it broad daylight. Holy cow.

We met our nameless hero in the first book in San Antonio. In order to deal with everything and to keep a record of his life–for however long it lasts–our hero keeps a roughly daily journal. Beyond Exile finds him at Hotel 23, a missile silo somewhere in Texas with the other survivors that he collected in the first book. Just when it seems like there’s no one else alive, the crew at H23 intercept a distress call from a group of marines. After rescuing the marines, Nameless’ people makes contact with what’s left of the US military.

Things hum along at Hotel 23 until a reconnaissance mission goes wrong and strands Nameless more than two hundred miles away from his safe haven, all on his own. The rest of the book (more than half) is all about his attempts to get home to his girl and safety. It’s a bit like reading a narrative version of Max Brooks’ Complete Zombie Survival Guide. It’s all about fighting off hordes, noise discipline, and finding shelter. It’s a cracking read. Even though the writing style is spare and our hero doesn’t do a lot of reflective thinking, you feel like you’re right there, riding along on Nameless’ shoulder, dodging the undead and trying not to die.

The book ends with a clear set up for a third book and I am very much looking forward to spending another day reading. (I sure as hell won’t read it at night.)

Y: The Last Man, by Brian Vaughan, Pia Guerra, and Jose Marzan, Jr.

Y: The Last Man

Y: The Last Man is a ten volume series and one of the best graphic novels I’ve ever read. Created by Brian Vaughan, Pia Guerra, and Jose Marzan, this series begins with a plague that inexplicably kills everything with a Y chromosome except for Yorick Brown and his capuchin monkey, Ampersand. As the series progresses, Yorick and his unwilling allies–a mysterious government agent and a geneticist, both with very small reserves of patience–try to find out what caused the gendercide, find a cure, and track down Yorick’s lost fiancé.

Meanwhile, they have to contend with dwindling food reserves, whacked out Amazons (who think the plague was a good thing), and AWOL Israeli soldiers who were tipped off to the existence of the last males. Throughout the series, Vaughan, et. al. keep the the pressure on. Every time it seems like Yorick’s team finds a safe haven, something happens to keep them on the road. Y: The Last Man is a great Apocalyptic road movie, but without (most of) the Mad Max stuff.

Over the course of the first volumes, Yorick and his team travel across the United States, then travel abroad to Australia, Japan, China, Russia, and France. Each volume is built around a smaller adventure, including rescuing stranded astronauts or dealing with the widows of a state militia, that builds into the bigger story. And, along the way, we get to see what might happen in a world without men. Turns out, women aren’t much better without men than we are with men. There’s war and violence and theft. It’s far from a utopia. If nothing else, men and women have in common the fact that we’re both human.

Graphic novels have been gaining mainstream acceptance for a while now, ever since books like Maus and Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. I think Y is part of that. Even though there are more pictures that words, Y is a nuanced story. It’s not filled with fist fights and inexplicable origin stories. Rather, the characters are strong and well developed and utterly believable. It’s engagingly told, too. I was hooked from the first page. Because it’s a graphic novel, it’s almost cinematic, complete with flashbacks for the principle characters and the odd explosion. It’s also a fast read. One of the great things about the format is that the scene setting stuff–which can really bog down a book if not done well–is taken care of by the images. The plot is handled by the dialogue and the action and it’s up to the reader to interpret everything, since there’s no text to explain the implications of what’s said and done. I love that.

Passage, by Justin Cronin

The Passage

I just finished reading The Passage, by Justin Cronin, and I have to say that all the good things I’ve been reading in the reviews are quite true. I’ve heard this book described as a cross between The Stand and Buffy, and the reviewer wasn’t wrong. They just forgot to add the zombie element. For most of the book, the protagonists have hordes of monsters on their trail.

But first things first. The novel begins with a series of introductions to a wide cast of seemingly unrelated characters. Any one who’s read mystery novels know that when a writer does this, the plots will converge, sooner or later. In not so short order, Cronin introduces us to a doctor searching the jungle for something, a very young girl with a hard luck life, an intellectually retarded death row inmate, and a world weary FBI agent on loan to the Army for a highly classified medial project. As Cronin starts to weave these characters’ stories together, he starts to ratchet up the creepiness factor. It’s been a long time since I read an author who could do dread like Cronin can do. Plus, Cronin has the knack for revealing just enough of what’s going on for me, the reader, to piece together the story without being spoon fed plot points. The story grows, organically. I know a little more than the characters and the mystery of what I don’t know drew me on. A good thing, since the book is well over 700 pages.

A couple of hundred pages in, believe it or not, the main part of the book starts. We leave Amy, the hard luck girl who fell into the hands of the army, somewhere in Oregon with the whole world falling apart around her. With the virus the Army and the doctor cooked up turning people into bloodthirsty vampire-zombies on the loose, we jump forward about 92 years into the future to meet the people of the Colony, located in the San Jacinto Mountains of California. The people are the children and grandchildren of minors sent west in the last days of the United States. After barely two generations, their society looks a lot different than ours even though they’re still waiting for the Army to come and relieve them.

Unfortunately, this is where the book bogs down a bit. After some interesting chapters learning about life in the Colony and meeting our next batch of protagonists, the action starts to slow down as the descendants go about their business. It takes a while for Cronin to ratchet up the tension again by having several key members of the colony start to go mad and make disastrous decisions for the Colony. Seeing no other option, Peter (our new hero) and Amy and a motley group of teenagers decide to follow an old Army transmission summoning Amy to Telluride, Colorado. The journey takes up the last half of the book and–gloriously–the action never slows down. It’s a bloody amazing read.

Like The Stand, there are supernatural elements to this story. And like The Stand, they felt superfluous to requirements here, too. The Passage has all the hallmarks of a great science gone wrong story: a doctor who doesn’t think about the consequences of his actions, an Army that wants to create super soldiers without thinking about the consequences, and a virus that can create some damned scary monsters. Why would you need more than that? But Cronin introduces some telepathy and some hive-mind dreaming and some serious hinting at destinies that feel like there’s also something supernatural afoot. I understand the point of the hive-mind stuff, but the rest of it just feels unnecessary when the rest of the book (apart from the slow bit) was so good.

Cronin is ruthless with his characters. He pushes them and scares them all the way until the end. The second half of the book more than makes up for the slowness in the middle and the weird supernatural stuff. I hit page 475 or so and could barely stop reading until I finished it this evening. The ending makes it clear that there will be more books in the series and I am eagerly looking forward to them. I badly want to know what happens with Peter and the rest of the gang.

Flood, by Stephen Baxter

Flood

Stephen Baxter’s Flood is the most disturbing book I’ve read in a long time. I actually had to take a break for a couple of days last week just to shake off the heebie jeebies. Like the title hints, this book is about a global flood. It’s based on what might happen if all the glaciers and ice caps melt and the earth starts to flood. On top of all this (and this is where the science fiction starts), three resevoirs of water buried underneath the earth’s crust and release enough water to drown even the Andes and the Himalayas. Unbelievable, but Baxter made it so real that when I drove through part of the Wasatch mountains this weekend, I couldn’t help but imagine them covered in salty water and people living in tents and shacks along the ridges.

I guess that’s the point of the book.

Flood begins a few years from now, in 2012, with a group of hostages from the United States and the UK are being held in Barcelona. After their release, the captives promise to keep in touch. This promise gives Baxter the premise he needs to hops around the globe to watch the progress of the flood. While the Americans’ dialog is not all that accurate, the rest of the book just sweeps you along. The book is divided into sections, and the story jumps along by five or ten year increments. It eventually covers three generations.

In the first section, we get to follow the characters around during a massive flood in London. The Thames Barrier gets overtopped and the water never goes down. Londoners and other Britains living in lowlying areas relocate to higher ground. By halfway through the book, England gets wiped out by a tsunami. Apart from the tsunamis and the London event, it just seems like the waters just keep rising. The characters constantly remark that people are tired of packing up and moving every couple of years. Governments relocate, but after a couple of decades the only one left standing is the American Government, holed up in the Rockies. The Himalayas are the setting for a three way war between Russia, China, and India and there are rumors of cannibalism. The Andes have been colonized by a rich Briton who is building an ark based on the Queen Mary and using local labor with the intent of abandoning them when the waters rise.

The first generation–the hostages’ generation–study the floods and try to preserve as much of their way of old way of life as possible. The second generation don’t know anything but moving and hunger and thirst and desperation. The third generation are used to the water and don’t care about the science. Sic transit gloria mundi, huh? One of the last scenes in this book shows one of those third generation kids watching the top of Mount Everest get covered and not understanding what the big deal is. Baxter puts such detail and pathos into his novel that it’s hard not to imagine yourself standing on one of the rafts floating around in the global sea watching the last bit of solid earth drown. (On a related note, this imagery led me to look up the terrible Waterworld on Wikipedia. “Course an hour later, I was reading about the Jewish Autonomous Oblast and Tuvan throat singing, further proving Randall Munroe correct.)

But I think the most heartbreaking thing about Flood was what happened to the birds and the terrestrial animals. As the humans fight to save themselves, there’s no one to look out for the animals. One of the second generation characters keeps a scrapbook of news about the flood and notes that there’s a web site named Toodle Pip that posts video of animals going extinct. She then describes what happens to the last polar bear. (I think that’s when I had to take my break.)

While I know that the extent of global flooding would never get as bad as Baxter describes in Flood, but if the polar ice caps go, it will get pretty bad. There will be extinctions and refugees, but at least there will always be somewhere to live.