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DOWN AMONG THE DEAD MEN
While its place in popular culture is assured, courtesy of films, video games and Michael Jackson's Thriller, until recently the zombie has lagged behind some of the other great horror archetypes in the literary stakes. Yes, there have been fine novels such as Somtow's Darker Angels and Dickinson's Walking Dead, but nothing to compare with the body of literature that has accrued around, for example, the vampire, and most of the significant developments in the zombie subgenre have come courtesy of film. In the main I think this is due to the zombie's status as a ‘blue collar’ monster, terrifying en masse, but with no memorable individuals for the reader to love or loathe in the way that we do such iconic figures as Dracula and Lestat, though there's evidence that may be changing post Romero's introduction of Big Daddy in Land of the Dead.
And yet, regardless of all the foregoing, it seems that here at Case Notes we are in the middle of a glut of zombie novels. Go figure.
US author Brian Keene is in the forefront of the zombie invasion. His 2004 novel The Rising was a thrill a minute tale told of a post-apocalyptic world in which the dead are reanimated by ancient spirits and where humanity has its back to the wall. Dead Sea (Leisure paperback, 337pp, $7.99), Keene's latest, is set in the same milieu, but for all practical purposes can be read as a standalone novel, with the demonic element of no concern.
Forced by fire and zombies to flee his safe house in East Baltimore, Lamar Reed falls in with two children, the precocious Malik and Tasha, and heavily armed former biker Mitch. They find sanctuary aboard the Coast Guard cutter Spratling and take to the high seas with a crew of other desperate people, and for a time all looks rosy, but their security is an illusion. The zombie threat gets a foothold aboard the ship, from which point on it's a tale of diminishing returns, as the ever dwindling band of survivors fight to reach the safety of an offshore oil drilling platform.
Like the other books by Keene that I've read, Dead Sea is a fusion of the action and horror genres (Rambo meets Romero). The action side of things is accounted for by the numerous fire fights and set pieces that punctuate the narrative, and as far as that goes it's an exciting and gripping story, with plenty of bang for our buck. The characters are well drawn and handled convincingly, with Lamar an agreeable protagonist, one with feet of clay but all the more engaging for that, trying hard to live up to the role of hero that's fallen into his lap courtesy of a Joseph Campbell quoting academic, and feeling inadequate even as everyone else thinks otherwise. And we get all the tensions and hostilities that inevitably arise in any small group forced into each other's company, with Keene never missing the opportunity for another turn of the screw.
As for the horror side of things, that's down to the zombies, of course, plus the obligatory lashings of gore and images that stick in the mind, such as a field of the crucified living dead, writhing on their crosses. More significant still is the sense of hopelessness that permeates the text, as every lifeline that's thrown to the characters is cruelly snatched away, and an unrelenting feeling of despair grows with each page. Ultimately, as the world collapses around him and possibilities dwindle, it's through growing into the role of father and protector to the children that Lamar achieves a kind of personal redemption. The subtext, if there is one, seems to be that, in a time when the world is going to hell in a hand basket, you find happiness and hope wherever you can. It's a hard message to hear, but Keene is a gifted storyteller, one who will hold your attention every step of the way on this journey into some heart of darkness, and regardless of how bleak, Dead Sea is never less than entertaining.
Cherie Priest's Not Flesh Nor Feathers (Tor paperback, 400pp, $14.95) is the third Eden Moore novel. Eden, for those not in the know, is a young lady with psychic powers (she can heal quickly and talk to spirits), and a resident of Chattanooga.
When street people start to disappear the authorities don't take the matter seriously. A friend of Eden's tries to involve her, but she doesn't place much credence in his story of things coming out of the river, though it does tie in with her aunt's misgivings about Eden's plan to move into a riverside apartment. Another friend, TV news reporter Nick, enlists her aid when the resident ghost at the Read House hotel turns nasty, performing poltergeist attacks on Eden and others. Of course the two plot strands connect, and when the river rises to flood the city an army of zombies take to the streets, led by the restless spirit of a dead girl, with death and destruction following in their wake. It's up to Eden to contend with tragedies both natural and supernatural, and put things back together as best she can.
Not Flesh Nor Feathers is a book with associations. Inevitably, as it concerns the flooding of a southern city, New Orleans will spring to mind, though Priest is at pains to point out in her afterword that the book was planned and sold before Katrina was anything more than a name, and while the writing took place afterwards it was not her intention to address that very real disaster in her fiction. Nonetheless, those events will inform any reading, and add a frisson of recognition as the waters rise and the authorities are shown as hopelessly unprepared, all their defences useless against the advancing tide, while human beings find themselves trapped and give in to panic. Other than that, with zombies in lieu of spectral pirates and a flood standing in for maritime precipitation, there are elements of the plot that could easily step into an identity line next to Carpenter's The Fog. Similar themes of retribution for past injustice inform the book. Of course, Carpenter didn't invent or have a monopoly on those concerns, and Priest more than makes them her own, adding racial intolerance to the mix. These twin associations, real and fictional, give Priest's novel a solid grounding, one that will resonate for most readers.
Eden is an engaging character, every bit as likable here as in her initial outing, feisty and tolerant, but with an edge to her. Instead of being simply a pretext for super heroics and plot leaps, her abilities are portrayed convincingly in that they not only serve her well in the survival stakes but come with attendant self-doubt and pain. And she also has a memorable supporting cast, from street person Christ Adams to possible romantic interest Nick, through her overly protective aunt and uncle and estranged brother Malachi, who has more than his own share of past sins to atone for (and he does). Priest puts them through their paces with a skill that enables suspension of disbelief as the ever more fantastic elements of the plot unfold, with scenes of outright horror interlaced with quieter, more chilling interludes. Few readers will easily forget either the fury of the poltergeist attack on Eden or the chilling scene in the prologue where two young women hide in the loft of a flooded building and listen to dead hands knock against the boards beneath them, but these and other set pieces are simply the appetisers for Eden's final frantic struggle against rising floodwaters and rampaging zombies.
David Wellington published his first novel, Monster Island, online and, near as I can figure, became the rage of the blogosphere, subsequently garnering a publishing contract (in the UK something similar happened with the case of Belle Du Jour—we get high class call girls, and in America they get zombies; so which country is backward, do you think?).
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The central character in Monster Planet (Thunder's Mouth Press paperback, 320pp, $13.95), the third and final volume of the series, is Sarah, the daughter of Island's protagonist Dekalb, who has survived in Africa, where isolated pockets of humanity continue to hold out against the zombie menace, but this idyll is coming to an end. When her mentor Ayaan is taken by minions of a powerful necromancer, the Tsarevich, Sarah comes up with an audacious plan to rescue her, but this involves travelling to America, where the Tsarevich has plans of his own, including a search for the magical Source. The trek brings her into contact with many characters from the previous volumes, including her father and his nemesis Gary, and the ancient druid Mael Mag Och, who plots the end of all life. Sarah must make hard choices, deciding not only the fate of the world but that of her father and her
best friend Ayaan, who has become a lich and thrown in her lot with the Tsarevich.
Wellington has been praised, deservedly, for his originality and his trilogy, with its near future setting, the characters’ easy familiarity with advanced weaponry and military technology, their use of viruses and cryogenics, all give the books a thoroughly modern feel. And yet by the third volume science has given way to what, for all intents and purposes, feels like magic, with an older prototype of the zombie peeping out from behind corners in the narrative, so reading it I cannot help thinking of Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique stories superimposed on the world of the twenty first century.
The cover proudly proclaims ‘A Zombie Novel', but Wellington seems loath to use the Z word. Instead we get ghouls and liches. We get necromancers at war with each other, and ferocious battles between the living dead and super strong mummies. We get dead people bred for intelligence and special abilities, so that at times the Tsarevich seems like Professor X surrounded by his own team of mutants. The streets of New York, the battlefield for Island, are now overrun with strange, luxuriant growths, plants that will feast on human flesh, while Gary, the enemy of yesteryear is reborn as a many legged monster. And at the end of it all is the Source, a Gaian like eruption of energy that can be used to kill or cure.
It's intoxicating stuff, and the end result is an adventure novel, one with numerous twists and turns of fortune, characters we believe in and care about even as we shudder at the circumstances that shaped them, a wealth of invention and incidental colour. Never less than readable, this is a series that transcends the zombie subgenre to offer a new merging of fantasy and horror in the modern world. In a nutshell, Wellington has brought back the magic and, kicking against the traces, made his zombies sexy.
The Devil's Plague (Abaddon paperback, 256pp, 6.99 pounds) by Mark Beynon is the third volume in the publisher's Tomes of the Dead. The premise behind this series is to take a historic period and introduce zombies into the mix, for which there's a fine precedent in Somtow's American Civil War novel Darker Angels. I enjoyed the first two Tomes very much, and there are the reviews to prove it, but this volume was disappointing.
It's set against the background of the English Civil War, which Cromwell was losing until he made a pact with the Devil and turned the tide with the aid of an army of invincible horse borne warriors known as the Kryfangan. But of course there are consequences to such tampering with the natural order, and the dead return to life to battle the Kryfangan. The story is told mainly from the viewpoint of theatre troupe manager Sir William Davenant, who finds Charles Stuart hiding in a tree after the Battle of Worcester and agrees to help him escape to Portsmouth. Along the way the pair and their travelling companions get into and out of various scrapes, with a final flurry in London when Kryfangan and zombies engage in all out war. There follows a hiatus of fifteen years, with the capital city abandoned to the combatants, before Charles Stuart returns in the historically significant year of 1666 to predictably cleanse the capital with fire.
This is all rather ramshackle, with Davenant's predisposition to get caught and then escape soon growing tiresome, so that you don't think of the story so much as plotted as a series of fires and frying pans thrown together to get the characters where they need to be. The Kryfangan are a horrendously contrived plot convenience, made no more realistic by attempts to identify other occurrences in history, and in a hopelessly naff epilogue that even a Hollywood hack might have blanched at we get Churchill meeting a Mr Cipher. Red herrings are planted as well, with a witch introduced and then abandoned, the suggestion that Charles Stuart is boarding the wrong ship which comes to nothing, and so on.
The writing doesn't quite catch fire either, even if London does. The action scenes don't come alive in the way that they did in previous volumes, and they seem doled out sparingly, with everything saved up for the big finale, regarding which, given the ferocity of both zombies and Kryfangan, I have to wonder how the conflict got dragged out for fifteen years, as a war of attrition seemed like the last thing on the cards. There are too many intrusive flashbacks used to move the plot along and some of the most obvious foreshadowing I've seen; Davenant, who's spent fifteen years in exile on the Isle of Wight, wonders what happened to his old mate Charles Stuart, and then wonders who was in the boat that crept ashore last night, only to find standing on his doorstep the next day...
The only parts of the book that worked for me, were the characterisation of Davenant and his troupe of actors, the picture of the life of a travelling thespian in puritanical times, where staying ahead of the authorities is the name of the game. And, as if to prove that this was the book's real narrative thrust, the main story ends anticlimactically with Davenant and his merry band getting to put on a long delayed performance for their rightful king. Check out the previous volumes first, if you want to know what the Tomes are capable of.
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Terror Island (Hadesgate paperback, 271pp, 11.99 pounds) by Rakie Keig also started life on an internet blog and comes with a cover blurb by David Wellington, but as with Monster Planet there's an old school feel to it. Old school in the sense that it brings to mind the classic Universal films in which Dracula met Frankenstein and Wolfman, with the same sense of gleeful fun and anything goes invention, but also a similar cavalier attitude to narrative cohesion and failures to address credibility.
Anna Martin and her student friend Mike are invited to visit a remote island off the coast of Norway, where her research scientist father is based, but on arrival they discover that he has gone missing. More revelations follow, as research station head Dr Ehren tells them the island's secret. Its soil has special qualities and for centuries it has acted as a safe haven for creatures considered supernatural by the human world. There is a village populated by werewolves, a vampire stronghold and three hundred zombies are contained in an enclosure on the far side of the island. Humans are here to experiment on the other life forms, with cooperation of a degree from the first two categories. And, of course, it's only a matter of time before things go pear shaped, with the zombies breaking out of their containment and attacking the humans, while vampires and werewolves join in to forward their own agendas.
My reservations are mostly to do with credibility. Even allowing for the existence of such a magical island, Ehren's willingness to permit Anna and Mike access to what must be one of the world's most closely guarded secrets doesn't stand up to close examination. Similarly, Anna has dreams of a strange girl who guides her actions, but this ‘psychic’ gift is never properly explained and doesn't seem to serve any useful purpose except to act as deus ex machina in the novel's end game. And there are other unanswered questions, such as the reason behind the murder in the first chapter and the fate of Anna's father. Whether these are simply plot holes or riddles to be solved in a future volume is never made clear, and certainly I can see a lot of potential as regards the latter option.
Reservations aside, what remains is an exciting adventure story with some attention grabbing action scenes as humans, zombies, vampires and werewolves duke it out, with the desperate fight inside the humans’ compound in particular offering some edge of the seat stuff. Keig's prose is somewhat raw compared to the other writers reviewed here, but she sets a breakneck pace as the story progresses, allowing the reader as little opportunity to catch his breath as she gives her characters, and continually pulling new surprises from up her sleeve. Nor does she stint on gore, with the zombies and others showing a lack of restraint and table manners that would challenge the ingenuity of a Tom Savini. Characterisation is handled with competence, so that each member of the cast has his or her own defining traits, and are easily recognisable. Yes, it is unsophisticated fare, obviously a first novel and pitched as entertainment rather than aspiring to any status as art, but Terror Island is never dull and taken on its own terms will provide a few hours of horror fun for most readers.
Deadbeat: Dogs of Waugh (Humdrumming paperback, 166pp, 7.99 poun
ds) by Guy Adams is the second novella in an ongoing series, and bucks the zombie stereotype by presenting zombies with personalities. I missed the first book and so am not too sure about the backdrop to this series. It seems to be set in a Britain where there is a zombie community existing just below the radar, known to the authorities but not of any real concern, and for all practical purposes the zombies seem to be just like everybody else, except dead. Adams’ protagonists, bar owner Tom and gadfly friend Max, are like nothing so much as the living dead equivalent of Wooster and Wooster, drinking, chasing girls and acting like fools. Toto, we are not in Pittsburgh, and that's for sure.
Dogs of Waugh also has the most original plot conceit, cleverly turning around anthropologist Wade Davis’ theory that the zombie state can be drug induced. Here it's the dead who are infected with a drug that induces all the symptoms of life, and thus become ripe for enslavement by the book's evil mastermind, an agreeably nasty bit of work called Waugh, who unleashes a zombie army and some ferocious other dimensional dogs on our heroes when they throw a spanner into his works. Fortunately Max and Tom have some rather unlikely but powerful allies of their own.
As a first step, a small caveat emptor: while it is a very nice product there is a lot of white space in this book. The novella accounts for 127pp of the total, but thanks to chapter divisions 55 of those pages are either blank or contain nothing except the name of the viewpoint character. The pages that do contain text have up to 48 lines, but all the same there's no getting away from the fact that you don't get as much story for your money as you might expect.
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