The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology
The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology ★★★
Edited by Christopher Golden
I’m giving this three stars because overall, the stories are okay and several are completely forgettable. But I also encourage you to pick up this anthology because a few are outstanding and it would be a crying shame if you missed them.
Making it to Outstanding:
“What Maisie Knew” by David Liss:
At turns creepy, sick and disturbing; absolute compelling reading. If this premise has come up before, it was new to me and I loved it. The zombies are not the monsters of this story. The squick factor is off the charts.
“Kids and Their Toys” by James A. Moore:
Think The Body meets The Girl Next Door. There is a reason why children shouldn’t play with dead things. I haven’t been this creeped out since reading “Children of the Corn”.
“Twittering from the Circus of the Dead” by Joe Hill:
Mr. Hill hasn’t totally blown me away with his novels, but his short stories are EPIC and this one is no exception. If only all Twitter feeds were this engrossing and suspenseful! What starts out as a young girl’s whiny bitch-fest in installments of 140 characters or less, morphs into heart-stopping terror.
“Family Business” by Jonathan Maberry
Easily my favorite of the bunch just because Maberry took what were the ingredients of a major story and turned it into a kick-ass novel called Rot & Ruin. Read the novel first though because the short story contains major spoilers.
Rot and Ruin by Jonathan Maberry
I have been on a zombie reading frenzy lately – I see a zombie book and I must read it, I can’t help myself. And the books are coming fast and furious, especially in the YA area. Some are good, some are awful, and some are outstanding. Jonathan Maberry’s Rot and Ruin falls somewhere just shy of outstanding. It reeks of EPIC WIN.
So yeah, I love this book and before I go all fangirl over Tom Imura and squee my head off let me highlight why you should start this series:
1) It is very well-written — that’s not always a given, even from talented authors — see my review of David Moody’s Autumn: The City. Moody is the man, but even he can write a zombie novel that sucks. Maberry has already established his reputation in the horror genre (his Ghost Road Blues snagged him a Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel). This is his YA debut and I’m impressed to say the least.
2) It is a highly charged, emotional story where some heavy shit goes down and you really fucking care who it’s happening to. This comes back to the all-important character development. I don’t scare if I don’t care, and I cared plenty here (even about the zombies!!!) Through the eyes of 15 yr old Benny Imura, we come to understand that zombies are not just mindless monsters out to gouge and consume humans. We see the tragedy of what they’ve become. Benny’s older brother Tom forces him to confront who they used to be:
Look at that woman. She was, what? Eighteen years old when she died. Might have been pretty. Those rags she’s wearing might have been a waitress’s uniform once….She had people at home who loved her….People who worried when she was late getting home.
So the zombies are not just plot devices or mere window dressing here; they serve a real purpose and are an important part of the story.
3) It’s a fascinating examination of what fear does to people. Just imagine a world that survives an actual zombie apocalypse. As groups of survivors ban together in fenced enclaves to try and eke out a semi-normal existence, who will these people become? How will they interact with each other, with the world that’s left to them? I know it’s a personal bias of mine, but I figure a zombie novel hasn’t done its job if it doesn’t convincingly show that humans can be the real monsters. Maberry hits that out of the park and I want to smooch him for it.
They held each other and wept as the night closed its fist around their tiny shelter, and the world below them seethed with killers both living and dead.
4) Tom Imura – squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! It’s been a long time since I’ve been this excited over a character from a book and reading as much YA as I do, most male protagonists are still battling hormones and attitude. But not Tom. Tom is in his 30s. He is a survivor. He is a specialist. He has been forged in battle and now is as strong and unbending as his katana – the Japanese long sword he uses. In a world that has been plunged into Hell and lived to tell about it he has retained his humanity. He is deep and soulful and will kick your ass in 2 seconds flat. He’s a mix of Master Li Mu Bai from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Morpheus from The Matrix, and my beloved Dean Winchester from Supernatural. How could a girl NOT fall in love?
I was going to pussy out and give this four stars, but piss on that. For all these reasons and more five stars and HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION!
Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly
“Because God loves us,
but the devil takes an interest.” ~Revolution
I find writing reviews for books I love quite intimidating really. I feel overwhelmed with the task of ever doing a book justice that I want everyone to read. And then there’s always the risk that if you gush too much, it’s going to turn people off, or build their expectations so high that when they do pick the book up they can’t help but be a little disappointed. But perhaps I’m over thinking it too much.
I had never read anything by Jennifer Donnelly before and didn’t know quite what to expect when I picked up Revolution. I thought the cover quite beautiful, and the historical aspect of the story called to me, so I had no qualms about giving it a try. What can I say about a book that totally swept me up in its pages and consumed my every free thought when I wasn’t reading it? The sheer beauty of some of its prose squeezed my heart. Donnelly does such an amazing job writing about music that I swear sometimes I heard the notes wafting up from the page. I’ve never claimed to be a music aficionado of any age or style, I don’t read music, I’ve never taken a music appreciation class – but I listen to music. It has an undeniably important place in my life, as vital as reading, and there is just something so simple and honest about the way Donnelly threads music throughout this novel that left me totally captivated.
Then there’s the story – about a defeated young girl undone by tragedy who has lost her way, and her will to live. Andi is angry at herself, at the world, and the depth of her grief and rage is like a sharp and vicious thing that she carries in her chest. Andi is definitely a young woman spiraling out of control.
I love how this novel unfolds, that it is two stories with two narrators – one contemporary one historical. The detail is so vivid, the sense of place so strong, you walk the streets of Paris and run through the catacombs that haunt the modern city to this day. French Revolutionary history is filled with brutality, intrigue, betrayal, hope and disillusionment. As a novelist, you don’t have to exaggerate any of the historical details, you simply stand out of the way and let the story tell itself. I feel that’s what Donnelly has done here; she’s taken her fictional creation – Alexandrine – and written her into the pages of history. Through Alexandrine’s diary, we get an intimate look at the scale of human barbarity it takes to pull off a Revolution.
Andi becomes consumed with the diary and with Alexandrine’s fate and the fate of the boy King locked in a tower to rot. She can only hope that the diary can give her the peace and understanding she seeks to save her own life. This book is gorgeously textured and layered like an 18th century French painting, or a beautiful piece of composed music. It is also a pulse-pounding page-turning adventure, an enigmatic historical mystery shrouded in intrigue and speculation. It’s a love story about the bonds between parent and child, brother and sister, lovers and friends. What else can I say? Read this book.
Random House has done a sumptuous book trailer for Revolution. Enjoy!
The Reapers Are the Angels (zombies can be literary)
The Reapers Are the Angels ★★★★★
by Alden Bell
Alden Bell proves that the literary zombie novel is not an oxymoron.
About zombies, you can say I’m … earnest. I love how they can be so many different things at once – pathetic, sad, savage, terrifying, unrelenting. Zombies are shambling and starving, haunted and lost. They ramble and feed, yet there is a hint, always just a hint, of some long lost memory of who they used to be. I love David Hine’s approach in FVZA: Federal Vampire And Zombie Agency — Hine’s zombies definitely carry some memory of who they used to be manifested in their response to music.
More than anything else, I love what zombies can teach us about ourselves because surviving a zombie apocalypse is going to cost you — your soul, your sanity, your faith, your humanity. Like any zombie story worth its salt, The Reapers are the Angels is not about the zombies. It’s about the survivors — the ones left hanging on by their fingertips to the jagged edges of a dying world that just won’t stay dead. A world that shifts and groans under the weight of biting, grasping corpses.
Temple knows this world. She’s been hanging on by her fingertips to the jagged edges for ten years, since her orphanage was overrun when she was just five years old. Now she is fifteen, fierce and feral. She might long for human connections and to find her place in the world, but the basics of human interaction and social etiquettes have passed her by. What she knows is survival at any cost, and it has cost her plenty. She can’t help but think: “I got a devil in me.”But Temple’s not a monster. Even as he hunts her across the country, Moses Todd explains: “I’ve seen evil, girl, and you ain’t it”.
This is a redemption story, because really, that is what Temple seeks even though she cannot articulate that basic human need in herself, for forgiveness, for someone to lay their hands on her and tell her she’s just a girl after all, and not an abomination.
I love the title of this book – there is something so poetic, so portent, so Old Testament medieval about it. The Reapers are the Angels … yes, I want to read that book. I want to know what that means. Alden Bell delivers prose to match that is so achingly beautiful in its stream-of-consciousness style. I love the heavy Southern dialect that’s been bastardized by time and trauma.
You give me a compass that tells good from bad, and boy I’ll be a soldier of the righteous truth. But them two things are a slippery business, and tellin them apart might as well be a blind man’s guess.
This is a short novel that manages to be epic in its themes and scope, all at once horrific, heartbreaking and rife with tragedy. The violence is explicit but even as the blood and stinking offal pour across the page the book’s magnitude and terrible beauty is never in dispute. Alden Bell is writing Southern Gothic set in a landscape where things are not “gross” but “grotesque”.
What more can I say? Read this book.
Everfound (Skinjacker Trilogy #3) ★★★★★
BRAVO! OUTSTANDING! EPIC ADVENTURE! SHEER DELIGHT! HEART STEALING!
HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION!!!
***An open letter to Neal Shusterman (please pardon me while I squee my head off):
Dear Mr. Shusterman (or may I be so bold as to call you Neal?) After completing the Skinjacker Trilogy I do feel like we are old friends and maybe even knew each other in a previous life. Also, I could kiss you smack on the lips and that seems to call for a first-name familiarity.
My first introduction to the Everlost realm charmed me to the very tips of my toes and to the very ends of each strand of my hair. The tale’s sheer originality enthralled me from beginning to end. You could say I got lost in Everlost (and loved every nail-biting, white-knuckled moment). There is sadness in this story of dead children who lose their way “into the light” and find themselves stranded in this in-between place. Their journey of discovery is filled with child-like wonder, fear, and yes, even horror. Sometimes, especially horror.
Could the sequel ever live up to its predecessor? I approached it with caution and much trepidation, but what the hell was I worried about? For you, Neal, had so much more in store for your readers yet. What joy to be swept up in an epic adventure! More delectable characters are introduced while the ones we have come to know are pushed even further to their limits. The fascinating world-building continues, the details delicious, the page-turning pace sublime. The tension of Book 2 builds to a crackling crescendo and a maddening cliff-hanger. How long would you make us wait for Book 3???!!!!
Fortunately, not that long (you could teach Mr. George R.R. Martin a thing or two about deadlines I daresay). Everfound is everything it should be and everything I hoped it would be. I don’t say that lightly (though I’m still feeling a little giddy and light-headed in the glow of having just turned the last page). You sir kept such awe-inspiring momentum going through all three books only to ramp it up OFF THE CHARTS in this final installment.
You really were saving the best for last weren’t you, you magnificent bastard? Not once did you have to repeat yourself, not once did you have to milk a great idea for extra points, you STILL had new stuff to show us, you STILL had places to take us that we’ve never been or imagined. I could not guess how it was going to end, I couldn’t even be sure you wouldn’t break my heart. “Edge of my seat” seems too trite and overused an expression, but that’s where I was Neal — on the edge of my seat.
Before I close I would like to sneak in here some of the other elements that make this trilogy so great — how it tackles the meaning of life and what makes life so precious in the first place — that it’s memory and remembrances of things past that make us who we are. Yes, you’ve given us a grand adventure Neal, but you’ve also given us a part of your heart I think. For I feel much love went into these novels, and that I am certain is what makes each of them worth loving right back.
And just in case there was any doubt left — I do love them, all of them, very very much. My sincerest thanks for introducing me to Everlost, taking me on this marvelous adventure, and getting me home safe again.
Forever yours,
Trudi (should we ever meet, you can definitely call me by my first name)
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? ★
by Horace McCoy
I know I must be missing something here, but I just don’t get why this has endured as a profound piece of classic American literature. Apparently 1930s French Existentialists went gaga over it and Simone de Beauvoir named it as “the first existentialist novel to have appeared in America”. So if you are a literary theorist, and get off on those labels and how they come to mean something to a certain group of people during a certain period of time, then you probably want to read this book and are going to think it’s pretty important.
As for myself, I was bored senseless. I didn’t know what to expect going in (having never seen the movie), but somehow I had the words horror and dystopia clanging around in my head. I was neither horrified nor presented with a gripping dystopian landscape. The concept is appealing I give you that — an idea redolent with potential: a marathon dance in the dirty ’30s that exploits and capitalizes on participant despair and desperation. The dancers dance because they have no other options. Guess that’s what got the French Existentialists all worked up.
In the introduction to this 2010 edition Gloria Beatty is described as driving the story:
with a tremendous negative energy that wells up from her understanding that the world – her world, the world that plays out beneath the Hollywood sign – is one of amorality and illusion.
She is also described as a complete nihilist. ::yawn:: Nihilists piss me off. It’s too easy to hate everything and everyone and only see the hypocrisy and cruelty in the world.
So the themes are “big” in this book, I get it, and I get why certain people would be attracted to it and want to talk about these big themes (I went to grad school with some of you), but not I sir for this very simple reason; I hate “big” ideas (insert jazz hands here) that don’t come wrapped in a gripping story that’s going to smack me in the face and wake me up. Story. Comes. First. Always. You may be brilliant and have awesome insights into the human condition, but unless you can weave a tale that’s going to put me on my ass I don’t want to hear about it. And I’m not helping you along by faking it When Harry Met Sally Style pretending you wrote a great novel because I’m keen to wax poetic on how the world is shit and then we die.
I think what really pissed me off is this review on Amazon.ca which writes:
it’s McCoy’s Horses that…so beautifully reflects the darkest side of the Depression days in the U.S., even more so than Steinbeck’s wonderful The Grapes of Wrath. McCoy gets to the very core of human desperation and misery, a cutthroat atmosphere where people will resort to ANYTHING just to survive.
Excuse me?! First of all, unlike Steinbeck, McCoy doesn’t come close to accomplishing any of that and second of all, comparing this short, painful, pretentious book to one of the greatest novels ever written is JUST SO WRONG. Epic delusions of grandeur my friend and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Epic fail.
The Summer I Died – extreme horror with heart
****WARNING!!! This book may cause violent seizures, recurring nightmares, and ongoing medical bills for psychological counseling. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK****
I finally feel able to write a review for this terrifying, gripping, grotesque book. Just a few words on what impressed me the most about this short debut. There’s a good chance I’ll run out of meaningful adjectives long before this review is finished, so bear with me if I get a little repetitive.
One: The Summer I Died is so very unrelenting. Once it starts, it just does not let up. It drags you along for the ride, kicking and screaming, and does not let go even though like me, you probably started crying “Uncle!” way before the ending. It’s been a while since a book made me faint, throw up, cry, and grimace all within the span of a few pages. That is awesome writing. Thomas’s prose is spare and cuttingly to the point. His descriptions are so effective that this book unfolds in full-on technicolor. There are a few scenes I will never, ever be able to wash from my memory, even with years of counseling.
Two: This book could have so easily degenerated into mindless torture porn, but it’s saved from that fate by Roger and Tooth. I just fell in love with these guys, so well-written and believable. Roger, the do-good college bound son and his best friend Tooth, the left behind, good-looking roughneck with father issues. Neither is made of hero material, but when caught up in a living nightmare, each rises to the occasion in his own way. I had a particular soft spot for Tooth – his defiance and gritty determination to escape made me think, if something like this were to ever happen, that’s the guy I want at my side. The indignities inflicted upon his abused and defenseless body made me weep.
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Three: The other twist in the book that really upped the rating for me is the involvement of Roger’s sister. The scenes involving her torture occur in another room and like Roger who can only hear her guttural screams, we are left to only imagine what depravities are being inflicted on her body, as opposed to knowing for sure. This makes for a very chilling juxtaposition to the explicit violence inflicted on Roger and Tooth which is described in minute, excruciating detail and leaves nothing to the imagination. Roger’s torment over the suffering of his sister is also wrenching. His final vision of her is horrifying and I will never forget it.
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Overall, this is a book I would recommend carefully because it certainly isn’t for everyone. If graphic violence is not your bag – STAY AWAY. If you are the adventurous sort however, and are looking for a tale with heart that’s going to traumatize you to your very core then by all means READ THIS BOOK. Just thinking about it again and writing this review has made me bump it up from four to five stars. It really is a diamond in the rough.
