Raising Stony Mayhall, by Daryl Gregory

Raising Stony Mayhall

Daryl Gregory’s Raising Stony Mayhall is an interesting twist on the zombie apocalypse in a number of ways. It’s a fresh story (though that might not be the right word considering that most of the cast is made up of animated corpses). In traditional zombie stories, the dead are mindless, hungry things. But in Raising Stony Mayhall, once the fever passes, the dead become aware again–bringing in all sorts of narrative potential and ethical complications.

The prologue to the book gives you a clear sign that something catastrophic has happened to the United States. But you don’t get enough information here to know exactly what happened. The prologue plants a seed of dread that grows as the story progresses. The first chapter then takes us back in time, to 1968, when a family of women find a dead girl on the side of the road, carrying what appears to be an equally dead baby. Except that the baby moves. He doesn’t breath or eat, but he moves. And through some miracle, he actually manages to grow.

The book really gets interesting once Stony gets into his teenage years. He’s known for some time that there was an outbreak in 1968, and that if he’s ever found, the authorities will shoot and burn him. But he chaffs at hiding. After a car accident, however, Stony has to leave the nest. He soon falls in with a group of other self-aware zombies. (They prefer LDs, or living dead.) The LDs live in secret, with human volunteers who hide and help them. But they are divided into factions. The Abstainers are strict in preventing any new outbreaks. The Perpetualists want to transform a few people to to keep their own race going. And the Biters, who want to get the humans before the humans get them.

I can’t say much more without getting deep into spoiler territory. As in Gregory’s previous book, The Devil’s Alphabet, this book is a fascinating mediation on what makes us human, especially when we don’t look human and the regular people are frightened of the differences. This book goes farther than The Devil’s Alphabet, because the LDs have the ability to transform any human into one of them and they have the awareness to decide whether or not to do so. Regular zombies are frightening enough. I thought I’d seen the pinnacle of scary zombies when they gave them the ability to run. But when you give them the ability to think, well that’s frankly terrifying, because it means not only will the usual precautions not work but also that killing them means that you’re killing a sentient being.

So, for a different and challenging spin on the zombie story, I highly recommend Daryl Gregory’s Raising Stony Mayhall. Fans of regular zombie stories may be disappointed in the lack of blood and gore, but this book is a rewarding read for all that.

Zone One, by Colson Whitehead

I’m well aware that it’s pretty macabre of me to enjoy zombie novels. When anyone asks me why I like them so much, I feel like I’m doing a little verbal dance to keep the questioner from knowing that I kind of like watching society as we know it be destroyed. What keeps me coming back to these books, really, is watching society rebuild itself. We’re pretty stuck with the way things are with our traditions, debts, enmities. Changing anything is very, very hard. So I often ponder the question: what if the slate were wiped clean? Would we get to build a great society, or would we try to rebuild the old?

Zone One

So, even though there’s not much zombie action (though there’s enough to satisfy the reasonably bloodthirsty), I enjoyed reading Colson Whitehead’s take on the zombie apocalypse in Zone One. The novel takes place over three days, though it covers more chronology through flashbacks. Our narrator, known only by the nickname Mark Spitz, is working as a sweeper in New York City. The worse seems to have passed and the sweepers are responsible for taking out the last lingering zombies that the Marines and the Army missed during the big push. Because Mark Spitz doesn’t have a lot to do, physically, he reminisces about the past. He doesn’t think much about this life before. Mostly, he thinks about his encounters with various survivors and “skels” and life at Fort Wonton in New York’s Chinatown.

It may sound boring, on the face of it. But I found the book interesting precisely because it ponders the same sorts of questions that I wonder about when I read zombie novels. In this version, there seem to enough vestiges of government and business from the old world to try and resurrect the old society. Sweepers and other advance groups are not allowed to loot or to destroy property. Chains of command are preserved. Government propaganda seems to be working overtime to forcibly raise the survivor’s morale. It seems that there are enough tethers to the past to keep the slate from truly being wiped clean.

To me, that would sound awfully pessimistic. But even having finished the book, I’m still not sure if Whitehead intends the book to sound that way, or if he’s trying to inspire a grim sort of hope. Because at the end of the book, I honestly felt both emotions.

Zone One is an interesting hybrid of genre and literary fiction. There’s enough action to keep you going, but the bulk of the book is designed to get readers thinking. Novelist Glen Duncan wrote a review of the book for The New York Times that pointed out the oddity of this blend (with a few snotty comments thrown in about lowbrow readers having to look up the big words). I suppose some genre fans might wonder about this big show treading on their turf. But I like to see genres blend like this. I’ve always thought that literary fiction could use more blood and guts and I know that genre fiction has a lot to saw about our society–it just gets dismissed by the cultural gatekeepers. I don’t know if this book is a gamechanger in that regard, but it’s a pretty good step in the right direction.

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.

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.

Dreadnought, by Cherie Priest

Dreadnought

I somehow managed to miss the second novel* in Cherie Priest’s Clockwork Century series, but Dreadnought stands very well on its own. Unlike Boneshaker, Dreadnought begins in Virginia, during a civil war that has been going on for over twenty years with no end in site. Priest continues to twist history by introducing steampunk and zombies (always a fun mix), to create the nail-bitingly tense travels of nurse Mercy Swakhammer Lynch.

We meet Mercy in the middle of rounds at a hospital that takes care of wounded Confederate soldiers. Soon after this grim opening, Mercy receives the news that her Yankee husband died in Andersonville and that her wayward father has been terribly wounded in far-off Seattle. Most of the action in this story takes place once Mercy starts her journey west. She must be the most unlucky traveler in the history of her alternate America because in short order, her dirigible is shot down by Union forces, she is chased across a battlefield, her train is attacked by jayhawkers, the Confederate Army, and zombies. In spite of all this, Mercy finds the time to join forces with a reluctant Texas Ranger in investigating why the train, the Dreadnought, is the target of so much pursuit.

Dreadnought (the book) is a curious blend of mystery and travel novel. On the one hand, most of the narrator’s attention (and perforce the reader’s) is devoted to getting from northern Virginia to Seattle in one piece. Mercy spends a lot of time ducking and covering, and then attending to the wounds of the injured men around her. But in the (few) quieter moments, a mystery develops. There are two cars on the train that are off limits to the civilian passengers. The last car especially is forbidden, under the charge of a very unpleasant scientist who refuses to take orders from anyone. When the contents of that last car are confirmed (anyone who’s read Boneshaker will have a pretty good idea of what’s going on), it’s like the last touch of something that makes the whole book an utterly ripping yarn.

Dreadnought is a very fun read, and I highly recommend it to fans of steampunk novels. I’d also recommend it to fans of adventure novels and alternate history readers. There’s a lot to enjoy in this book, and I very much look forward to the new book in the series that’s coming out this fall.

* The second novel, Clementine, appears to be available only as an ebook.

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.)

Boneshaker, by Cherie Priest

Boneshaker

How can I resist a book billed as a steampunk zombie novel? I took Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker home from the library Friday evening and finished it last night. Because the end clearly set up a sequel, I look forward to the next installment of the adventures of the Wilkes family.

Boneshaker is set in an alternate Seattle. More than that, it’s set in an alternate United States where the Civil War has just entered its 18th year of fighting. All the action takes place in Seattle and on Bainbridge Island. So where did the zombies come from? About 16 years before the start of the novel, a man named Leviticus Blue–supposedly to win a prize from the Russians–created a massive drill (the eponymous Boneshaker). On its first test run, the drill destroyed the financial district and let loose a gas known as the Blight. The Blight is highly toxic and, after it kills you, it turns you into something like a Boyle zombie called a rotter. Downtown Seattle was evacuated and, to contain the Blight, a massive wall was built and the population evacuated. The gas is still seeping out of the ground and, for the non-zombies who still live in the infected area, air has to be pulled down to street level and gas masks worn outside of safe areas.

The novel follows two main characters, Briar Wilkes and her son, Zeke. Briar is the widow of the man who created the drill and is a social outcast. Zeke is desperate to prove that his father was an innocent inventor. When Zeke goes over the wall to try and prove this, Briar has to enlist the help of air pirates* to get over the wall an rescue him. Zeke meets Doornails (nickname for the living on the other side of the wall) with suspect motives for helping him and runs away from rotters. Briar meets people who honor her sheriff father’s peace and who help her try and track down her idiot son. Meanwhile, they both try to stay out of the way of the tin pot dictator who runs a lot of the polluted territory. This man, a Dr. Minnericht, sounds an awful lot like Briar’s inventor husband.

It took me a chapter to two to get into the book, most likely because of all the hype on the back cover. Boneshaker starts out sounding a lot like your standard steampunk alternate history. The book really gets going when the action shifts to inside the wall and the terrifyingly fast and clever rotters show up. Hell, even the air is dangerous and the characters have to be very careful to wear gas masks with strong filters. One minor character lets his slip and he gets zombified within minutes.

From the Underground Tour

There is a lot of unbelievable stuff in this book. What helps is that Priest made the setting so real. Many summers ago, I went on the Underground Tour of Seattle. Seattle has a fairly wacky frontier history as it is; it really is a great place to set a novel like this. The characters spend a lot of time underground. Every time they went below, I was reminded of what I’d seen on the tour. There are tunnels underneath downtown Seattle. They’re close and dark and dirty and I could totally imagine rotters running around down there. The tour should probably be required before reading this book. At the end, Priest writes a defensive sounding Author’s Note where she apologizes for the liberties she took with the history and yes, she knows that X wasn’t built until 18-whatever.

Boneshaker is a very original and very enjoyable book. The only thing I didn’t really like was Zeke, who seems to waver between being a defiant young man and a whiny teenager. When he’s in whiny mode, he’s a little hard to take. At points, when Zeke was trying not to puke in his gas mask, I couldn’t help but think that this little inside-the-wall jaunt would be good for his character. Briar is the best part of the book, I think. She’s strong and determined. Even when a literal man in armor comes to rescue her, there’s some question about who’s rescuing who. I look forward to seeing more of her.

* All steampunk novels have to have dirigibles. It’s the law, apparently.

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.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Seth Grahame-Smith

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Ever since I first heard rumors of this book I wanted to read it. Pride and Prejudice and zombies? Two of my favorite things. It can’t get much better than that. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is exactly what it sounds like: the story of Pride and Prejudice but with zombies added. The undead are swarming around England while Mrs. Bennet is trying to fix her daughters up with eligible. The plot follows the original plot, but with some twists–notably Lady Catherine’s ninjas. (Yes, ninjas.)

This book is like the ultimate mashup. Two genres smacked together to create a very weird and silly fusion. It was an absolutely hilarious read. Even though a lot of the subtlety of Austen has been lost, the zombies and martial arts and bloodthirstiness makes up for a lot. It was purely fun to read. I couldn’t put it down all this afternoon and evening until I got to the end. Even though I knew roughly how it was going to turn out–because if Grahame-Smith changed much of the ending, he’d have angry Austen fans hunting him down–I want to see how the zombie stuff would all play out.

I think part of the purpose behind this book was a little bit of wish fulfillment, in that a lot of the characters we love to hate get their just desserts (*Lydia*) and a lot of the moaning about “what does he think” and “will he come back” has been replaced by the moaning of zombies. As for the rest, I think this was just a fun project for the Grahame-Smith. I mean, arming the Bennet sisters and letting loose some zombies. How awesome is that? Granted, it’s no work of art, but it’s one of the funniest things I’ve read this past year.

The critics haven’t been particularly kind to this book. And I can see why. Like I said, a lot of the subtletly is gone and the motivations and emotions are explainined in plain terms. Sometimes it’s an uneasy mix of Romantic literature and horror, and you kind of wish that Grahame-Smith had just written an alternative history with zombies and not hobbled himself with the cast of Pride and Prejudice. But then you would lose the charm of the chutzpah of this idea. So, I guess my final verdict is that this is a fun, entertaining read, but don’t expect the depth and intelligence of Austen.