I am not a zombie person. I’ve watched no more than half an hour of a zombie movie. I skimmed Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. And it’s not completely because I find the subject disturbing. (The previews for I am Legend , which I’m assuming was zombie based, did make me a bit queasy.) Mostly, I’ve never gotten why zombies have such a…well, fan following. I can grasp how the mystique of Dracula drew people in. I can understand the fascination of shape shifting. But zombie stories have always seemed rather flat and one-dimensional. Dead people tend not to have much in the way of emotional conflict or personal growth, and the living peoples’ jobs seemed to be run and die.
Then I read Feed.
I found Rosemary and Rue on the new bookshelf at the library years back and promptly fell in love with the Toby Daye series. I started reading Seanan McGuire’s blog since it’s practically literature in its own right, and it didn’t take long for me to realize that she had another series under the name Mira Grant, and it was about zombies. It still took me nearly two years to crack open the cover of the first book.
Most books, I need to get hooked within the first fifty pages if I’m going to like the book. The few books that have hooked me within a few pages tend to go to the top of my “books to rave about when asked what I’m reading” list. Feed hooked me with the two paragraph excerpt inside the front cover. I then ripped through it faster than the main character’s motorcycle, skidding to a halt on the last page with a long tar mark of thoughts and ideas across my mind.
Seanan is easily one of the top ten best fantasy writers currently alive. She might not be the biggest seller, or have the incredibly iconic character everyone’s heard about even if they never read books, or even the largest legion of dedicated readers. But she dominates many a famous name in the field of writing. I’ve long held that writers must be born, that some ineffable spark must be there from the beginning. But after that, writing is about hard work and craftsmanship. I feel that many published books are authored by people with one or the other, resulting in really good books that I enjoy, but that just don’t quite reach the plane of true greatness. Seanan clearly has both the spark and the dedication to roll up her sleeves and work.
As is equally true of the Toby Daye books, the plot unfolds at a dizzying pace. And there is very little excess in the book. The understanding of the world and how it works is staggering. The casual almost throw away explanation to where the zombies came from alone must have required a vast amount of research and a better grasp of biology than your average high school course offers. The way journalism works, the way politics work, is all organically worked into the plot so that the reader doesn’t have to stop to work out why things are happening the way they are. And the author has no fear of going where the story needed to go despite, I’d hazard, a fair amount of mail along the lines of “how could you?!”
The two siblings, their parents, friends, cohorts, acquaintance, enemies…this is not a small cast list. But unlike many books, I didn’t spend time flipping back through the early chapters to remember who a character was or how they related to people. I’ll risk a slight spoiler since I don’t feel it gives away much for a book that is about zombies, but one character shows up for maybe a few pages total of face time and then is infected and killed. When that character dies, I didn’t need to go double check who she was or why she was important. When she is referenced later as a causality, I didn’t have to try and place the name. She was memorable. And that doesn’t even touch on the main cast all of whom are fleshed out and painted in such a way that the reader feels deeply connected to them. I especially loved how they were portrayed as a multi-layered people. Street smart, old before their time kids who had seen too much and had heard even more. Professional, dedicated journalists, willing to risk all for truth. Stupid, immature, teasing kids who still knew how to have fun.
So am I fan of zombies now? Probably not. But there are now zombie books on my shelf. And if Mira Grant should choose to pen more novels? I’ll definitely be reading them.