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Book Review: Dead Aware: A Zombie Journey by Eleanor Merry

 

Dead Aware: A Zombie Journey by Eleanor Merry

LAC, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1999212810

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

 

When does a zombie story become interesting again, after the glut that’s thicker than the goo between the undead’s ears?

Dead Aware  is a tale that’s enjoyable from start to finish, that was an unexpected pleasure. Told from the points of view of an undead couple, Merry’s story chronicles Clara and Max Jacobs from living to dead to undead to… whatever.

A strange virus – F.I.R.E. (Fever Induced Rapid Encephalitis) hits the world hard – and fast. The onset is pretty standard for a zombie novel,  but that’s just where the fun begins. Both Max and Clara succumb to the affliction while separated on different ends of Canada:  him in Toronto, and her in British Columbia. Through the help of Jay (a fascinating character that truly helps “flesh” out this story), Max recovers slightly and begins to speak again, think again, and remember his love for Clara.

Max embarks on a journey to find her, a trek wrought with obstacles that would stop most of the living. Being undead comes with its own bevy of obstacles, but he’s determined to get back home, without devouring any humans on the way.

Meanwhile, Clara is captured and tested by a military group that wants the zombies dead. However, Rachel, a scientist who knows something about this virus, is dead set on finding a cure, or at least a way to help the afflicted to “live” in society peacefully. The relationship between the two women brings yet another dimension to the novel that separates it from most of its kind.

Merry has written a story that deserves to be read, enjoyable for fans of the undead or simply those who enjoy their horror with a heart. Her writing is solid and intriguing. The characters ring authentic– creating empathy for the undead is pretty tough to accomplish– yet she pulls it off in just 154 pages. As this is the start of a series, it will be intriguing to see where the story heads next.

Eleanor Merry is a new writer to watch.

 

Reviewed by David Simms

 

Posted on September 12, 2019 by , Reply

Book Review: Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

Balzer + Bray, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-0062570604

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, MP3 CD

 

 

Editor’s note: Due to its topic and content, Dread Nation contains racial slurs and outdated language. I’m using “Negro” in this review as it is the term used throughout the book.

 

In this alternate history, the Civil War ended after the dead rose at Gettysburg, forcing the Union and the Confederacy into a truce while they fought off cannibalistic “shamblers.” A law passed shortly after required all Negro and Native children, starting at age 12, to be trained to fight the shamblers in single-sex combat schools, for the protection of white Americans (Ireland writes in an author’s note that she got the idea for the schools after reading about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a boarding school intended to erase Native American culture and language and assimilate the children). Just as before the war, there are opposing movements regarding the treatment of Negroes: the Egalitarians, who believe they should be treated equally, and the Survivalists, who believe they are naturally inferior to white people.

Sixteen-year-old Jane McKeene, the biracial, dark-skinned daughter of a white woman married to an absent Kentucky plantation owner, has been training at an exclusive combat school that trains girls as Attendants, bodyguard companions for wealthy white women and girls who are trained not just in combat but in social skills and etiquette. Intelligent and talented in combat, Jane is rebellious when it comes to conforming to society’s demands and has more interest in helping others survive than in good manners, good looks, and appropriate conduct. Her frenemy, Kate, is not only talented in combat but attractive, well-dressed, well-mannered, and light-skinned enough to pass for white– enough to earn Jane’s enmity– and stubborn enough to eventually earn her respect. Jane’s insistent ex, Jackson, comes to her in secret to ask for help in discovering what happened to his younger sister, Lily, who lives with the Spencers, a prosperous white farming family of Egalitarians, passing for white. The family has disappeared, and he’s afraid they’ve been taken by shamblers. Jane, Kate, and Jackson sneak out to the family’s farm to discover that the family has disappeared, and that the mayor, a Survivalist, is covering it up.

In the meantime, Jane and Kate save the lives of the attendees of a lecture about a vaccine to inoculate people from becoming shamblers when bitten, including the mayor’s wife, and are invited to attend a dinner party at his house. They use the opportunity to sneak Jackson in so he can search for evidence about the mayor’s involvement with the disappearance of his sister and the Spencer family. but are caught and sent to a remote Survivalist utopian communty, Summerland, where white people live in relative luxury, protected from shamblers by cruelly treated and poorly armed Negroes. Jane is able to convince the authority figures of Summerland that Kate is actually white, saving her from the deadly labor of protecting Summerland from shamblers, and giving her a set of opportunities and problems that come along with attempting to pass as an attractive white girl in a community built on unabashed white supremacy.

I suppose what technically qualifies Dread Nation as a horror novel are the “shamblers,” who, while we aren’t certain by the end of the book, are probably carriers of an infectious plague that turns them into mindless, uncoordinated, cannibals with an endless urge to feed. But the zombies merely illuminate the true horrors that take place in the book, those grounded in arrogance and vicious white supremacy. The sheriff and the preacher are truly cruel men who use every opportunity to punish the Negro characters and establish their superiority, but even the overseers are casually brutal, and the white townspeople are willfully blind. Even before the girls are sent to Summerland, it turns out that characters who are supposed to care for them are absolutely horrible under their genteel surfaces. Every time Jane attempts to save lives by stepping in between another person and a shambler, she is punished for overstepping her place.  Ireland demonstrates that even sympathetic white characters are complicit in the preservation of what they know is an unfair and cruel system.  Mr. Gideon, a white scientist and engineer who wanted to provide electricity to frontier communities using natural resources, is an ally in many ways, but is trapped in Summerland, forced to use shamblers’ “manpower” to run the town’s generator, which preserves the image that all is going as it should and perpetuates the racist system the town is built on.  Jane and Kate are both aware of how they can use negative stereotypes to manipulate white characters, and Kate is very conscious of how she can use her “whiteness” to her advantage, as well as how vulnerable she is.

In this #OwnVoices novel, Ireland portrays shifting vulnerabilities and loyalties as marginalized individuals attempt to navigate the racist system they are forced to function within are evident here in a way they might not have been if a different person had written this book. The Lenape character Daniel Redfern is somewhat of a mystery. One might think he and Jane would be natural allies, but while he saves her life early in the book, he is also responsible for her getting caught and sent to Summerland. Jane’s relationship with her mother, told in flashbacks and in bits and pieces, ends up putting a surprising light on what you think her story actually is. Jane’s relationships with both her mother and Kate contribute to a nuanced portrait of the damage, as well as the advantage, of colorism and “passing.” The other Negroes Jane works with in Summerland are more than a mass of victims– Ireland gives those that Jane interacts with names and personalities, and their agendas and fears sometimes set them against each other. The way the difficulty of being female intersects with the difficulty of surviving as a Negro is amply illustrated, not just through one set of eyes but through the experiences and stories Jane shares with many of the other characters. In addition to race and gender, while it isn’t an emphasis of the story, Jane expresses interest in both women and men, and Kate is pretty solid that she has no interest in romance or a relationship with either sex. As this is the first book in a series, it will be interesting to see how (or if) Ireland develops that further.

Dread Nation is a great read as a YA horror novel, and if that’s all you want from it, you can certainly read it that way. But it’s also a really intelligent, well-plotted book with great characters that has the ability to appeal to a widespread audience (including people who do not traditionally read either YA literature or horror) due to its nuanced exploration of race and white supremacy, character development, world building, approach to the past, relevance to the present, and its just generally fantastic writing. I have sold so many people on trying this book who would never in a million years have picked up a straight zombie novel. It’s not short, so I don’t know that reluctant readers will jump on it, but for the YA reader who likes independent-minded female protagonists, alternate histories, doesn’t mind a little gore, and can handle the racial slurs, this is an outstanding choice that more than deserves its place on the final ballot for the 2018 Stoker Award. Highly, highly recommended.

Contains: Gore, violence, murder, torture, slavery, racial slurs, references to sexual violence.

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

Editor’s note: Dread Nation is on the final ballot of the 2018 Stoker Awards in the category of Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel. 

 

 

Posted on April 25, 2019 by , Reply

Book Review: Broken Lands by Jonathan Maberry

Broken Lands by Jonathan Maberry

Simon and Schuster, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-1534406377

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook

 

I will be honest, I am not a fan of zombie fiction.  As a reviewer, I am putting my feelings about the genre as a whole to the side to review Broken Lands because it is on the final ballot for the 2018 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel. I know Jonathan Maberry is a talented author whose work in both the adult and young adult categories has been judged as outstanding, not just in the community of people who write horror fiction or love zombie fiction but by other reviewers, including librarians (and librarians are not an easy audience to impress).

Broken Lands is the first book in a follow-up series to Maberry’s YA series Rot and Ruin. That series introduced backstory on how and why the apocalypse happened and introduced the teenage Benny Imura as a main character. Previous to writing the Rot and Ruin books, Maberry wrote adult zombie fiction starring a special ops soldier, Joe Ledger. I have not read either the Rot and Ruin books or the Joe Ledger books, so Broken Lands is my introduction to Benny and his friends and to Joe. Benny and Joe each have their own, narratives, which alternate with a third narrative involving Gutsy Gomez, a teenage girl who is uncovering a disturbing secret about her town and its involvement with a secret military base nearby (For purposes of representation, Gutsy is essentially uninterested in sex or romance, although she is described as bi, and she has a kiss with Alice, a lesbian).

The book starts out strong, with an abrupt hook that introduces and characterizes Gutsy and the world she’s living in with just a few words, enough to make even a reluctant reader curious enough to turn the page. Her story mainly takes place in and around New Alamo, a town of indeterminate size in New Mexico that was formerly an internment camp for undocumented immigrants. Maberry takes no time to ratchet up the suspense and action. Short sentences and plenty of white space push the reader on through not just Gutsy’s actions but her thought processes as she observes the cemetery. I wasn’t wild about Maberry’s characterization of grief as something that you work your way through and eventually come out of healed, but his portrayal of Gutsy’s grieving, and how horrific it is to have the person you are grieving come back from the dead to attack you, I thought was spot on. She’s a girl who thinks and acts and doesn’t slow down. Her friends, Alethea and Spider, are loyal and supportive, and secondary characters are developed enough for the reader to care about them, at least a little.

Then we switch to Benny and his friends, in Reclamation, California, a town of about 16,000 people that they helped to defend and rebuild. Reclamation has managed to connect with eight other towns in California and the new American government being established in Asheville, North Carolina, but Asheville has suddenly gone silent, and Joe Ledger, who was on his way from Reclamation to Asheville by helicopter, has disappeared. Benny and his friends decide to steal six “quads” (small four-wheeled vehicles), from the town, tie up the guards on watch duty, and go off to search for Ledger and then on to Asheville. Experienced, tough, and with varying levels of skill in combat, Benny and five friends take off across unknown country. Teenagers do a lot of unwise things, but this choice, for me, went beyond normal levels of maladaptive judgment. I am not a young adult, though: maybe actual teenagers would find this plausible.

My guess is that Maberry wanted us to see what the wasteland beyond California looked like and to get a preview of the zombie hordes that is stomach-dropping dreadful. There is a lot of zombie fighting, including a battle with a zombie silverback gorilla and an absolutely horrific experience in a state prison where the locked-up prisoners, all zombies, are in starvation mode. There’s also observation of their bizarre surroundings, including mutations from chemical spills, bioweapons, and radioactivity, and growing dread as they witness intelligent zombies directing endless hordes of shambling horrors. While Asheville is in the South, Benny and his friends find themselves driven further and further south, towards the Mexican border, because the radioactivity, mutations, and zombies all have to be avoided. And because there are six teenagers in various states of romantic involvement, there’s also teenage drama. It could be that the character development of the teenage characters all occured in the previous series, but aside from Benny (the point of view character) and Chong (who is holding off zombification with medication only available in Asheville) the characters sort of blended together for me.

Finally, we have a storyline where a hunter tracks down Joe Ledger, whose helicopter has crashed, and they turn out to be former comrades. They decide to go to New Alamo to hunt for a weapons cache and then head to Asheville together. I enjoyed the Joe Ledger storyline. I could tell that Maberry was comfortable writing Ledger and it was interesting to watch the relationship between Ledger and his new partner.

All three sets of characters collide as a horde of  hundreds of zombies overtake and burn down the secret military base where scientists have been running experiments on the citizens of New Alamo (because apparently it’s okay to conduct racist, fatal scientific experiments on undocumented immigrants) and head for the walls of the town. Benny and three of his friends sneak in through a tunnel infested with zombies, killing everyone in their path until they reach the interior. Gutsy and her friends and neighbors (about ten of them are named) defend the walls. Ledger wades straight into the middle of the horde and starts cutting zombies down. The hunter, who turns out to be Benny’s older half-brother Sam, uses a sniper rifle to take down zombies one at a time. This small group of people who have not coordinated in any way defeat and kill all the zombies, including any bitten or killed townspeople. Gutsy then discovers the director of the hospital and the leader of the scientists from the military base attempting to escape with the records of their experiments, and stops them. The book ends with a shocking reveal which I can’t give away, but which will definitely send readers after the next book.

My overall impression is that Maberry does a great job creating suspense and action with a very economical use of words, and uses vivid language to describe the mutating, destroyed land that the characters must cross. The grave-robbing and scientific experimentation in New Alamo contributed to a rather heavy-handed critique on immigration policy, but the introduction of Gutsy Gomez, whose experience of these was intensely personal, led it to be a very strong storyline. Here was a girl who put her grief on hold to deal with life-and-death issues and did what had to be done, even at great personal expense. Maberry certainly manages to instill a feeling of dread and horror with the zombie hordes and one-on-one battles, even those that are only implied (the final time Gutsy and her friends have to kill her already dead mother is not depicted, but it doesn’t have to be to get the emotional impact) and the human horror, of what military scientists were willing to do to innocent people, is appalling. It’s not for nothing that Maberry has a reputation as a gifted horror writer.

However, I felt that he depended far too much on his readers’ knowledge of backstory for characters from previous books. As someone who hasn’t read any of Maberry’s zombie books, I felt lost among the characters that carried over from his previous books. The transition between narratives was often clunky, with Maberry spending a long time in one narrative, then cutting out to a different one that I had lost track of, and switching time periods back and forth. I would have liked to see more of a focus on Gutsy’s story (and maybe Ledger’s). Based on the sudden ending, I assume that there is going to be a second book, and perhaps a better choice would have been to focus on Gutsy in this book and Benny in the next (Rick Riordan did this successfully in his Heroes of Olympus books, in which the first book focuses on a newly introduced character and the second switches to a character from the previous series). There is good action and suspense, some pretty raw horror and violence, and some compelling writing and description. Readers of Maberry’s previous books will probably like this one, but it’s not the one to start with, and I suspect it’s not nearly his best work.  Recommended for public libraries, high school library media centers, readers of zombie fiction, readers who enjoyed the Rot and Ruin books, and for Jonathan Maberry fans.

 

Editor’s note: Broken Lands is on the final ballot for the 2018 Bram Stoker Awards in the category of Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel.

Posted on April 5, 2019 by , Reply
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