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.

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.

Ghosts of Belfast, by Stuart Neville

Ghosts of Belfast

When I picked up Stuart Neville’s Ghosts of Belfast I thought the ghosts described were metaphorical. After all, what former killer for the IRA doesn’t have the “ghosts” of his victims following him around? We meet the protagonist, Gerry Fegan, drinking in a pub, trying to drown out the voices and sight of the quite literal ghosts that have been following him around since just before he got out of Her Majesty’s Maze Prison. There are eleven of them, and they let him know that the only way to get rid of them is to get revenge on the people who caused their deaths.

Gerry’s ghosts and his memories take the reader on a trip through the violent history of the Troubles, while letting us know that the bad times aren’t as over as they seem to be. Catholics and Protestants still hate each other, almost as much as Republicans and Unionists do. As Gerry goes after Republicans and undercover Scots, members of the provisional government and law enforcement try to hunt him down and stop him before Gerry destroys the Good Friday Agreement. This makes Gerry sound like a violent psychopath, but he’s not. In spite of everything, he’s a good man. He argues with his ghosts to try and spare lives, but they are relentless in getting what they want.

The writing in this book is incredible, with a wonderfully drawn cast of heroes and villains (and some characters who are a bit of both). I felt for Gerry. He’s good at killing people, yes, but all he wanted was to stop and go on with his life. Neville gives you the necessary history without letting the pace of the book bog down. (Though I will admit that I spent a lot of time on Wikipedia looking things up. I couldn’t help myself.) Even though I knew roughly what was going to happen, I couldn’t predict where each subsequent chapter would go. I didn’t even know if Gerry would live long enough to get the ghosts their revenge. This an amazing first novel by an author I hope has a long career.

Android Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy and Ben H. Winters

Android Karenina

About three years ago, I read Anna Karenina and I absolutely hated it. Not only was it incredibly dull, but I didn’t care for most of the characters. Reading it was a long, hard slog and I blame my reading group for letting me choose the book in the first place. So, when I saw Android Karenina, I had two thoughts. First, I had no problem with Quirk Press turning it into a horror story. Second, it has freaking robots! Anna Karenina can only be improved by the inclusion of robots.

I have to say, I was not disappointed by this book. I read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and while I enjoyed it, I mostly thought it was silly. Android Karenina somehow rises above the silliness and had some interesting things to say about authority. Like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, this book stays pretty close to the book it’s based on, with a lot of material cut out to make room for the wackiness. Unlike that other mashup, this book has an entirely new ending.

There are two couples in this book and the story jumps back and forth between the two. First, there are the eponymous Anna Karenina and Count Alexei Vronsky. They meet at a train station and it’s love at first sight. Almost right away, they begin an affair. Second, there’s Konstantin Levin and Kitty Shcherbatsky, who pursue a more traditional path to love. When I read the original, I thought that Tolstoy was showing his readers that sin leads to ruin and that virtue leads to a good life, thought more subtly than I just phrased it. Both couples have their ups and downs, but only Levin and Kitty get a genuinely happy ending.

That much remains the same in Android Karenina, but in this book more plot is packed in where Winters trimmed out Russian gentility. For one, Winters packed in a lot more action. Vronsky literally fights for promotion in a very cool weaponized exoskeleton. Anna and Vronksy survive an attack by aliens at the theater. Levin almost gets blown up a couple of times. If only Tolstoy had thought to include a few more explosions. He would have held on to my attention better that way than with petty romantic squabbles.

In the original, I felt like there was a tone of sadness to the whole thing. That feeling as been placed with one of dread. There are hints that something big is coming throughout the book, though not enough to figure out what’s going on until near the end. One of things that contributes to this (and is one of the biggest changed from the original) is Anna’s husband. He’s just as cold and brooding as in Anna Karenina, but in this book he turns into a terrifying villain who seems intent on not only wrecking Anna and Vronsky’s lives, but also on ruining the entire country. Because Karenin was part cyborg, it was a little easy to see that he would go Doc Ock eventually. What made his subplot so engaging and terrifying was that there was no one to stand up to him and stop him. Anna and the rest of the characters were too busy living their own stories to wonder what Karenin was up. Getting to know the new Karenin made reading this book absolutely worth it.

A large part of the entertainment factor of this book is seeing how the robots fit into this society. The manners are the same and I found that I could enjoy the story more knowing that these people’s cozy lives weren’t resting on the backs of the serfs. Some of the characters take trips to the moon and into orbit, replacing the spa trips in the original book. But by far the best part of this book, I thought, was the ending. It’s very different from the depressing end to Anna Karenina, which can only be a good thing. I hate to say too much, but it involves a huge deus ex machina and a little bit of time travel. It was wonderful and I’m actually kind of looking forward to more mashups from Ben Winters.

Carrie, by Stephen King

Carrie

Just as I like to read irreligious books at Easter, I like to try and read a genuinely scary book for Halloween. My own small Halloween celebration this year was to reread Carrie, by Stephen King. I forget how long ago it was that I first read it and, since I’ve never seen a film version, I’d forgotten enough of the plot to get really involved in the book again.

Compared to later King novels I’ve read (and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m selective about which King books I read), Carrie has a lot of raw emotional power and is more skillfully constructed than a lot of those later books. Carrie is told in two strands, for lack of a better word. In one, you follow the major characters in the days leading up to the infamous prom. In the other, you get excepts of news dispatches, scholarly books, congressional testimonies, and letters. This second thread lets you know in advance that something terrible is going to happen, though they withhold the details. It gives the whole book an atmosphere of inevitable catastrophe, making it a great tragedy in the full literary sense of the word.

Even without Carrie’s latent talents, this would have been a gut-wrenching book. Carrie, modeled on two girls the author knew while growing up (according to the author’s foreword in the paperback edition I read), was one of those kids who everyone picks on. She’s just different enough and friendless enough that everyone picks on her. Contributing to Carrie’s delicate psychological state is her hyper-religious mother. I’ve long thought that too much religion will warp the psyche, and Carrie and her mother bear our my theory. (I would say they bear it out nicely, but there’s nothing nice about this family.) Carrie’s mother, Margaret, is so extreme in her beliefs that even churches with a fundamentalist bent are too liberal for her. Instead, she hold her own services. Because she kept her daughter at home except for school, Carrie has been subject to her mother’s twisted ideas and violent will since she was a child. Carrie is abused at school and at home, and has no friends or hobbies that can help take her away from that.

…Until the day that a spectacularly cruel stunt at school triggers something paranormal in Carrie. Throughout the book, the secondary sources quoted refer to it as TK–telekinesis. This fluke of genetics gives Carrie what she needs to exact revenge on her mother and classmates. The only kindness Carrie experiences is when a classmate tries to ameliorate her guilt at participating in hazing Carrie talks her boyfriend into taking the unfortunate to the Spring Ball. This boyfriend, Tommy, is a very good boy and does help Carrie have an enjoyable time–until some other students decide to pull one last prank on her.

When I read this book before, I remember disliking Carrie at the end of the book. It was so long ago that I’m not sure why I disliked her. This time, I saw Carrie as a wounded animal, like an abused dog that keeps trying to please its masters but gets beaten down so much that it turns mean. At the end, all she wanted was to hurt the people who had hurt her and could not be reasoned with. While some people were just caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, I could still sympathize (a bit) with Carrie. As I said before, Carrie strikes me as a genuine tragedy. Carrie was a flawed human being who managed to turn the tables on her antagonists for a while, then died a death full of pathos.

The Walking Dead, by Robert Kirkman, et al.

The Walking Dead

And so I go from seeing worlds built up to watching them fall apart. Last night, I started reading the first collection of episodes in the Walking Dead series. The purpose of this series is not just to tell a kick-ass zombie story, but to tell one that doesn’t end. Kirkman writes in his afterword that the thing he hates most about zombie movies is that they end. He always wanted to see what happens to the survivors after the credits rolled.

The beginning is a little derivative, as it starts pretty much the same way that 28 Days Later does, with the main character waking up in a deserted hospital after waking from a coma. Rick Grimes is a former small town cop who realizes that his family is missing, and that everyone left in the hospital and the town has turned into a zombie (Romero-style, not Boyle-style*). He find a pair of survivors who tell him that the last they heard, people were supposed to gather in the cities and that his family has probably headed to Atlanta to wait for a cure. When he arrives, as you’d expect if you’ve ever seen a zombie movie or read a zombie novel, that everyone in the city is dead. He meets a scavenger that leads him back to a camp where (surprise!), Rick finds his wife and young son. From that point on, Rick, his family, and the other survivors travel from place to place, trying to find a place to settle down and live in peace.

The art is a very stylish black and white, which I appreciate. There’s zombies about every five pages or so, on average, so if they did it in color the book would be covered in red and gore. It also harkens back to the original Night of the Living Dead.

I’m looking forward to the next books in the series, but I need to wait for the publishers to print more copies because Amazon seems to have run out of copies for the time being.

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* Romero-style zombies: slow-moving zombies, created by unknown causes but allegedly because “there’s no more room in Hell for the dead.” From the Night of the Living Dead series.

Boyle-style zombies: fast, aggressive zombies that were possible created by a virus or something. Still alive, but very hard to put down. From the 28 Days Later series.

The Strain, by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan

The Strain

I’ve been a fan of del Toro for a long time. Yes, I like the Hellboy movies. Pan’s Labyrinth was amazing. He has a strong and original imagination, like an even more demented version of Grimms’ fairy tales, but I was curious to find out if it would translate into a non-visual medium. Sure, books can contain powerful descriptions and the best writers can make a reader see the story in their mind as they read. But it’s not the same as a movie. I’m not sure how much of The Strain is Chuck Hogan, since I haven’t read any of his other books, but I could definitely see del Toro’s imagination at work here. While The Strain is not as startling as del Toro’s movies, it is still a great read.

The Strain takes the idea of vampires and viruses and runs with it. Much like the vampires in the Buffyverse were animated by demons, the vampires of this book are animated by a virus that spreads through the body like a cancer and adapts the body into a killing machine. The vampires in this book are not the sexy, cool creatures we’ve been seeing in movies and books currently (I’m looking at you, True Blood). They’re throwbacks to Nosferatu–pale, bald beasts with talons and mostly unable to think about anything apart from sucking the blood out of people. They’re a bit like zombies, and the virus is just as contagious.

And of course, the main characters don’t have much going for them. Ephriam Goodweather is a doctor who works for the CDC. Abraham Setrakian is a lot like van Helsing, a creepy old man who knows what’s going on. There are other incidental characters that I believe will play bigger roles in the other two books in the series. Setrakian has be preparing to face the Master–the bid bad vampire–since the Second World War and has to work hard to convince the scientist Goodweather what exactly is going on. Setrakian’s case is helped when a couple of the infected attack Goodweather in the hospital. Del Toro and Hogan, however, have played with the myth so much that this virus seems unstoppable. The only thing keeping the vampires from infecting everyone are the rivers surrounding the island of Manhattan; these vampires can’t cross running water without help.

I will say that this book is kind of cinematic. It’s told in short chapters that read like scenes in a movie. The pace is fast and if I had had the time, I would have read it in a single sitting. I am looking forward to the next two books.

Plague of the Dead, by Z.A. Recht

Plague of the Dead

Can’t believe I forgot to post about this one. I read Plague of the Dead, by Z.A. Recht, as part of my ongoing to quest to find book zombie novels. There’s just something so visual about zombies, that I think it makes it hard to pull one off in a book. This one, though, succeeds admirably. I read it in less than twelve hours a couple of weekends ago and was hooked from the first page.

The Plague of the Dead is the first book in a (I think) trilogy. It documents the beginning of a world wide zombie outbreak. USAMRIID (the Army’s version of the CDC) picks up on an emerging African disease that turns people into zombies. The government–or at least a Men in Black branch of the government–clamps down on the story to “keep people from panicking.” By the time it becomes clear what’s going on, it’s much too late. An international coalition fails to quarantine Africa and the zombie bug spreads to the rest of the world.

The story follows four different major characters in three different plot threads that won’t fully converge until later in the series. That’s okay with me; I have no problem reading more from Recht. This book was totally addictive. The zombies are terrifying (because some of them can still run and jump). There’s conflict between different groups of humans, mostly from Men in Black still on the loose. The characters, while not the most imaginative chracters I’ve run across, are appealing and I worried about them during their many close calls.

This is the third book I’ve picked up from Permuted Press, small imprint focusing mostly on zombie horror. And I’ve enjoyed every single one that I’ve read. I only noticed them on the book scene recently, so I don’t know too many details. But I think they’re going after books that the more mainstream publishers are passing by. Not sure why, because when I talk books or movies with people, I usually find another zombie fan or two.

I need to order the next one and find out what happens next.

Vicious Circle, by Mike Carey

Vicious Circle

I am so glad that Carey wrote another book in this series! And that it came out so soon after I got my hands on the first book. The first book, which I reviewed earlier, was The Devil You Know. Vicious Circle picks up a couple of months after the events of the first. This one was a little less violent than The Devil You Know, but it was just as interesting and, possibly more disturbing than that debut novel.

As in The Devil You Know, our hero starts out with two cases that, at first glance, don’t look like they have anything to do with each other. Castor is asked to find the ghost of a young girl by her parents. Then, he is asked to consult on a case for a demon who apprenticed under him until she could get certified as an exorcist. Plus, there are a couple of loup-garous on his tail, inexplicably trying to keep him from finding the girl’s ghost.

When I started to read The Devil You Know, I had some doubts about an author who had gotten his start writing graphic novels. But Vicious Circle in particular is packed with mood- and scene-setting language, and details that make the whole story richer. I really believe that Carey did his homework, because there are scraps of Latin and a lot of Greek, details about magic and history, and a general plausibility that helped keep me in the story. I love it when authors use facts and scraps of the truth to make their stories believable. It hooks me every time.

I started reading this book yesterday, and I had a hard time putting it down. I was totally hooked from the first chapter and didn’t manage to put it down until 2:00 in the morning. Good job I started the book on a Saturday. I’m also glad that I managed to pick this book up after I had read the first, because I would have been pretty lost. Carey is very good at explaining things without sounding like he’s explaining (one of my pet peeves in books is when a character or a narrator starts discoursing about history or philosophy or sociology and brings the plot to a screeching halt). But you need to start at the beginning in order to get the whole story.