The deadly epidemic started in China. This time it’s ... zombies.
4.5 stars, rounding up because sheer brilliance.
I'm not, generally speaking, a fan ofThe deadly epidemic started in China. This time it’s ... zombies.
4.5 stars, rounding up because sheer brilliance.
I'm not, generally speaking, a fan of horror fiction in general or zombie tales in particular, but World War Z popped up on my radar so many times that I finally decided to give it a go. (I checked it out from the library; I wasn't going to stick my neck that far out for this book that I'd pay actual money for it.)
Anyway. World War Z takes the quasi-historical documentary approach to the zombie apocalypse, as a set of loosely-connected interviews gradually builds a picture of humanity's reaction to the zombie infection that quickly spreads around the world. Max Brooks examines the many ways this kind of a disaster would affect us: socially, militarily, psychologically, and more. The lies that government leaders tell their citizens. The lies that people tell themselves. The determination and heroism of some characters that infuses this otherwise depressing story with hope.
It's definitely not your standard zombie-flavored horror story. The horror is as much in the way some people react to the catastrophe (e.g., profiteering) as in the moaning, grasping and biting (a 100% death sentence if you get bit) of the zombie hordes.
Recommended if you're interested in a more analytical approach to the genre. I thought it was fascinating. VERY different from the movie that it inspired....more
3.25 stars for this zombie fantasy set in Seattle, Washington. Final review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Kincaid Strange is one of only two kno3.25 stars for this zombie fantasy set in Seattle, Washington. Final review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Kincaid Strange is one of only two known remaining voodoo practitioners in Seattle. She’s had a hard time making end meet, ever since new laws went into effect restricting the raising of zombies. Permanent zombies ― called five-line zombies for the magical lines that anchor their four limbs and head to life ― are outlawed entirely; four-line temporary zombies (who are missing the magical line to the head) may be raised only under severely restricted circumstances. Temporary zombies are actually quite useful in resolving issues like murders and last will and testament disputes, but under the new laws that’s mostly forbidden as well.
Kincaid’s prior job as an independent consultant for the Seattle police department has ended as well; the new police chief is adamantly anti everything paranormal. So Kincaid gets by with the help of her roommate Nathan Cade, the ghost of a grunge rocker who still gives concerts when he’s in the mood, and who can down a surprising amount of beer. (Nate manages to run up quite the beer tab on Kincaid.)
Matters get more complicated when Kincaid gets a phone call from a brand new zombie, Cameron Wight, who was a local artist. Cameron has no memory of how he died or why he’s been raised as an illegal zombie ― an impossible mix between a four-line and five-line zombie. As Kincaid tries to help Cameron, her investigation of his situation seems to tie in to people ― and zombies ― who are starting to die (or die again) at some unknown murderer’s hand. Not to mention that there’s an extremely hostile and powerful ghost who’s beginning to haunt Kincaid, wanting something from her that she has no idea how to give him.
The Voodoo Killings is an urban fantasy focused on zombies, but mixes in ghosts, ghouls and some other supernatural doings along with its murder mystery plot. In this world, zombies will stay intelligent and rational ― and will refrain from attacking and eating people ― as long as they get enough human brains in their diet … so there’s a black market in brains. It’s amusing, if a little gross, to see Kincaid trying to convince Cameron to drink his brains milkshake. Kristi Charish creates an entire underground (literally) city of zombies, hidden underneath Seattle. It’s an interesting concept, but I couldn’t help but wonder how they found enough human brains to feed the zombies there and keep them from going on a zombie rampage.
Charish’s writing style is straightforward, without any literary frills or pretensions, but some humor. Charish does have the habit of dropping odd facts into Kincaid’s narrative, like the fact that she has a ghost for a roommate, her rocky family history, or her issues with her ex-boyfriend Aaron, a Seattle homicide detective whose phone calls she’s assiduously avoiding, without much, if any, context. Much later on, the background information shows up in the narrative. I suppose it’s a way to avoid too much info-dumping early on, but I found it rather distracting.
The Voodoo Killings is a reasonably good urban fantasy, not quite up to Ilona Andrews’ standards of imagination and humor (not to mention romance, which is almost an afterthought in Voodoo Killings), but ― in my mind at least ― comparable to Faith Hunter’s JANE YELLOWROCK series. If you’re a Jane Yellowrock fan, I’d suggest giving Kincaid Strange a shot. The murder plot is resolved in the end, but there’s an unexpected twist in the final pages as a teaser for the second book in the KINCAID STRANGE series, the just-published Lipstick Voodoo. I found the world of Kincaid Strange engaging enough that I jumped right into Lipstick Voodoo when I was finished with this one.
Initial Post: I got about 100 pages into the just-published sequel to this book, Lipstick Voodoo, and realized that its plot really hangs off on a lot of the events in this first book. The publicist was kind enough to shoot me a PDF of this first book yesterday, and I downed it in one evening (it kept me up until about 2 am).
Content notes: Scattered F-bombs and a fair amount of violence. Also, eating (and drinking!) of brains....more
Kincaid Strange is a 27-year-old woman who’s one of the only “zombie practitioners” in th3.75 stars. Final review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:
Kincaid Strange is a 27-year-old woman who’s one of the only “zombie practitioners” in the Seattle area. She can temporarily (or permanently, for that matter) raise people from the dead, which is clearly handy when you want to temporarily raise a rich old man and ask him to amend his will in order to avoid a family lawsuit. Lipstick Voodoo opens with just such a scene, with a crotchety old man who’s not impressed with his family’s reasons for raising him from the dead, and an impressively sleazy lawyer.
The laws against paranormal dealings have been relaxed somewhat due to the fallout from the events of The Voodoo Killings, the first book in this KINCAID STRANGE urban fantasy series (obligatory spoiler warning here for that book). Unfortunately Kincaid still has a boatload of problems, many of which resulted from the events in that prior book. She has an on-again-off-again boyfriend, Aaron, a police detective whose new chief hates the paranormal division. So Kincaid’s best client, the police force, won’t hire her as a consultant any more, and Aaron is caught between his boss and his former girlfriend. The vengeful ghost of a powerful sorcerer, Gideon Lawrence, is massively unhappy with Kincaid, particularly since she burned a body that Gideon was planning on taking over and inhabiting.
What Gideon doesn’t yet know ― and Kincaid is afraid he’ll find out, since Gideon is entirely capable of choking her to death with a hair dryer cord or some other household object ― is that the body in question was accidentally taken over by another ghost, Kincaid’s roommate Nathan Cade, a grunge rocker who’s been dead (but not gone) for twenty years. Now instead of a ghost for a roommate Kincaid has a zombie, and one whose body is starting to rapidly deteriorate. Even the brain Slurpees (YUM) aren’t helping Nate’s body much. Despite her magical power and expertise in All Things Zombie, Kincaid can’t figure out how to untie Nate from this gradually decaying body.
In the middle of this, Aaron unexpectedly offers Kincaid a job helping him investigate a cold case, the apparent murder of a musician, Damien Fell, which occurred over twenty years ago. Nate once knew Damien; he claims not to know anything about Damien’s death, but he’s clearly hiding something important from Kincaid. As Kincaid digs deeper into the case, interviewing Nate’s old girlfriend Mindy and his bandmate and drummer Cole, people start dying in gruesome ways.
It’s always exciting when the sequel is better than the first book in a series, and that’s how I felt about Lipstick Voodoo. This one gets points for really sucking me into the story, much more than The Voodoo Killings. I had a couple of issues with the underlying logic of the mystery. For one thing, Damien Fell is described as a “devout Mormon” who never drank alcohol or even coffee or tea ― one of the reasons his death from a heroin overdose is suspicious. Yet Damien is also supposed to have been “hooking up” with Mindy before his death, which would contradict his character as a devout Mormon. There’s also an undeniably creepy demon-like power from the Otherside (the spiritual dimension) called Eloch, with black, smoky tendrils that reach out and freeze their victim, but the powers it displays didn’t seem to mesh very well when the answer to the mystery of Eloch was finally revealed.
These quibbles aside, Lipstick Voodoo wove a compelling mystery that kept me glued to its pages. It’s interesting reading a zombie fantasy where the zombies are the more sympathetic characters; it’s mostly the humans and the odd wraith and ghoul that cause the real trouble. As I mentioned in my review of The Voodoo Killings, Kristi Charish‘s writing is reasonably good. She’s not using any poetic language, evocative imagery or other literary tricks, just straightforwardly telling a story. So this is a fairly light, quick read.
Which brings me to my final quibble: reading the two books in this series back-to-back, I noticed a couple of places where Charish uses almost word-for-word the same language in both books to describe some secondary characters, including entire paragraphs. It struck me as a bit lazy or sloppy.
Several elements of the plot in Lipstick Voodoo hang heavily off of events from The Voodoo Killings, and there’s a lot of significant character development that carries over from that first book as well. In fact, I started reading this book before I’d read the first one, but called a halt about 100 pages in because so much of the plot here relies on understanding events and characters from The Voodoo Killings. So I went and read that book and then started this one over again. Hence, I’d very strongly recommend reading the books in this KINCAID STRANGE series in order.
I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review. Thanks!!...more
A bleak, zombie-type short story by Neil Gaiman, and an online freebie here at Tor.com. Brace yourself for the strong possibility of being confused onA bleak, zombie-type short story by Neil Gaiman, and an online freebie here at Tor.com. Brace yourself for the strong possibility of being confused on first read ... like I was. A huge thanks to karen for helping me to interpret this story (see the thread to her review for our discussion, but be warned there are major spoilers in those comments). Our discussion, and a reread of this story after, led me to increase my rating from 3 stars to 4.
In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the face and lips and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smiled and kept moving.
He’s a man running away from his life (there are hints of a failed relationship), driving away from his home and then continuing to just drive, throwing his cell phone out of the car window, withdrawing all of his money from his accounts. He meets a stranger along the way, Jackson Anderton, an anthropologist who studies young Haitian girls who sold coffee door-to-door and were rumored to be zombies. When Anderton mysteriously disappears, the man gathers Anderton’s ID and scholarly papers and slips into Anderton’s role as an attendee and presenter at an anthropologists’ conference in New Orleans. There he meets more people who drift in and out of his life, each sharing cynical or disturbing thoughts or ideas or other things that seem to pull the narrator further along his path toward some destiny that awaits him.
People come into your life for a reason.
“Bitter Grounds” is Neil Gaiman‘s bleak take on Haitian zombies in a New Orleans setting. I have to say, my first read of it has left me massively bewildered, flailing around on the internet in an attempt to make sense of what I had just read. It’s an elusive, subtle horror story, with hints of death and rot, grim humor, and quotes from Zora Neale Hurston, an African American author, folklorist and anthropologist, woven into the mix.
“Bitter Grounds” is a Gaiman story (like “A Study in Emerald”) that has layers and elements that reveal themselves more fully with study and rereading. A fan of Hurston or Haitian voodoo would doubtless find fruitful ground here. I would love to discuss and unpack this story in a literature course, complete with a study guide and a knowledgeable professor to help explain and analyze its elements. Even reading it twice, I felt like I was missing a lot … but I appreciated what I was able to catch.
Initial post: "Bitter Grounds" is Neil Gaiman's take on Haitian zombies in a New Orleans setting. I have to say, my first read of it has left me bewildered (which isn't an uncommon reaction, based on the other GR reviews here). Is the narrator a zombie (and an unreliable narrator in that case) or is he just a man who's lost his way in life and is drifting? I'm not sure ....
A somewhat disturbing but thought-provoking SF short story. If you like this kind of thing, it's free online here at Lightspeed magazine. Review firstA somewhat disturbing but thought-provoking SF short story. If you like this kind of thing, it's free online here at Lightspeed magazine. Review first posted at Fantasy Literature.
Charlotte is “unincorporated”: just a brain in a jar with nutrients, able to move from place to place in a small transporter cart. But she dreams, day and night, of having a real human body. For five years Charlotte has scrimped and saved every possible penny at her low-end job in order to earn enough money to buy a body, customized to her design. Deprived of a body her entire life (apparently everyone in this world begins as a disembodied brain and needs to purchase or inherit one), she plans for a corpus with endearing details that most of us would reject, wanting a perfect body. But Charlotte’s choices show how deeply she wants to be human, including our flaws:
Charlotte’s corpus will be sixty years old, because she loves the way corpi droop at that age. Sort of like weeping willows. She’ll store extra fuel in thick padding on her belly, waist, and hips. Her black skin will be prone to flaking because Charlotte plans to try every scent of lotion they sell, once she has the chemoreceptors. Her hair will be thick, black, kinky, and unruly—like dendrites—and she’ll never try to tame it.
Charlotte initially firmly rejects the black market body that one of her co-workers has opted for, but when a traffic accident injures her and her biochamber, taking a huge chunk out of her savings, Charlotte has a difficult choice to make.
Charlotte’s devotion to her dream and her daily struggle to make it a reality, depriving herself of the slightest luxury, as well as her sense of honor, are as appealing as her world is otherwise appalling. When the traffic accident happened, I kept expecting to read that she would get a settlement for the injuries to her brain and biochamber, hopefully enough to pay for a body … and it never happened (which was hugely frustrating for me, as a lawyer!). This story gave me a renewed appreciation for my body, wrinkles and all. Including the palmaris longus....more
3.5 stars. Final review, first posted on Fantasy Literature. Some spoilers for the first book in this series, Warm Bodies:
When we left R, the recover3.5 stars. Final review, first posted on Fantasy Literature. Some spoilers for the first book in this series, Warm Bodies:
When we left R, the recovering zombie, and his human love Julie at the end of Warm Bodies, things were looking hopeful. But not so fast: becoming fully human again after years of zombie-hood isn’t as quick or easy as R hoped. His body is still stiff and clumsy, and his memory of his prior life is still a blank to him (in fact, he’s not at all sure he wants to remember his prior life). The recovery of the other zombies that have taken over America is equally tentative, one small step at a time, with many zombies not recovering at all, and others backsliding. It’s a spectrum: Living, Nearly Living, Mostly Dead, All Dead, with unsettlingly fluidity between them. R has no idea what to do next.
If this weren’t difficult enough, a new group, Axiom Corporation, shows up in force at the stadium where R and Julie live. Axiom has weapons, helicopters and lots of very disturbing minions with plastic smiles, ready to take control and restore order. In fact, the Axiom people are insistent on it, smiling all the while, and willing to do almost anything to get their way. When R, Julie and their friends end up on the wrong side of Axiom, they go on the run with the somewhat reluctant help of Abram Kelvin, a renegade Axiom employee who is the older brother of Perry ― Julie’s old boyfriend who was eaten by R at the beginning of Warm Bodies. But are they escaping to a new life somewhere else, or running into the jaws of more trouble, or going on the attack against the forces of evil? And let’s not forget the innumerable zombies.
The Burning World (2017), Isaac Marion’s sequel to his 2011 Romeo-and-Juliet inspired zombie tale, left me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, Warm Bodies felt like a stand-alone story. I didn’t feel like it needed a sequel and I’m not certain that Marion originally planned for one at the time he wrote Warm Bodies; it feels a bit like an afterthought. On the other hand, The Burning World doesn’t simply rehash the same story and issues raised in the first book. Marion expands this world dramatically, both in setting and thematically.
The Burning World fleshes out the characters from the first book, but takes them and the plot in a wholly different direction that opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities. It’s an on-the-road adventure … with zombies … and a truly horrific, power-hungry corporate entity that exhibits a dog-eat-dog mentality taken to extremes. The reader is left with the indelible and uncomfortable impression that humans can be, and often are, worse than zombies. As R begins to recover some of the memories from his human past, his “first life,” the horror that men can sink to begins to take on added meaning for him, and for us. Julie’s human flaws become more apparent as well, as she endangers those around her in her single-minded quest to find and save her mother.
There are several interlude “We” chapters that are told from the viewpoint of an unspecified, omniscient group who watch the world and the people and creatures in it. They float through the earth and the sky like a collective consciousness, watching us with concern. It’s interesting to speculate on who this nameless, intangible “We” is … though I’m not certain there’s a single, specific answer.
The adventures of the characters are gripping, but The Burning World is largely a grim book with only brief glimpses of hope and joy. It exhibits much less of the underlying sweetness that imbued Warm Bodies, while upping the ante on grittiness and violence, and exploring the darkness in men’s souls.
The Burning World is part of a novel that grew too large and was broken into two separate books for publication. As a result, it ends inconclusively, leaving most of the plot threads hanging, along with the fates of our characters. The second part of this story, The Living, is due to be released later in 2017.
Content advisory: Isaac Marion writes well, but this is a gritty and frequently gruesome story, with violence, torture and hard-R language.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a review....more
In Warm Bodies (2010), our world has been overrun by the zombies, and the few humans who a4.5 stars. Final review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:
In Warm Bodies (2010), our world has been overrun by the zombies, and the few humans who are left are fighting a rearguard action. They huddle in walled enclosures, sending out occasional armed expeditions for food and supplies. Regular school classes have fallen by the wayside, replaced by classes and demonstrations on how to best kill a zombie permanently (head shots).
R is a zombie who doesn’t remember his past life, except that his name maybe started with the letter R. He can speak a few syllables, more than most of his zombie companions, and think complex thoughts that his tongue can’t share. R and hundreds of other zombies live in an abandoned airport, going on group hunts to the city to try to find food, in the form of humans. When they eat the brains of the Living, they experience fragments of the human’s memories, and it energizes them.
R and his friend M lead a zombie hunting party to the city one day and come across a group of humans who have ventured out of the stadium where they live. R attacks and kills Perry, the young man leading the group. As he bites into Perry’s brain, he’s hit with Perry’s memories of moments with his girlfriend Julie. When R recovers from these visions, he sees Julie cowering in a corner. Against all his zombie instincts, he rescues Julie from the other zombies and leads her back to his home, a 747 commercial jet parked at the end of a boarding tunnel. As R and Julie get to know each other better, Julie gradually loses her fear of R, R edges back toward humanity, and the two develop an unlikely friendship. But their relationship is a threat to those around them, both the humans and the Boneys, the animated and malignant skeletons that lead the zombie horde.
R is a zombie with a heart ― even if it’s not beating ― and philosophical thoughts that he can’t really share, since a zombie’s conversational abilities are so very limited. But he finds his tongue and heart are loosened as he gets to know Julie. And as R continues to snack on bits of Perry’s brain that he saved for later, many of Perry’s thoughts and memories are shared with him; kind of like in Stephenie Meyer’s The Host, Perry is often a separate voice in R’s head. But R’s feelings are his own. R’s narration is intelligent and engaging, dealing with the horrors of his murderous lifestyle with self-deprecatory humor that, together with the slowly developing romance, lightens the otherwise bleak post-apocalyptic setting.
I got all the way to the end of Warm Bodies before I realized how many connections Isaac Marion has made to Romeo and Juliet. R and Julie are the star-crossed couple, with the zombies and humans playing the roles of the houses of the Montagues and Capulets. Perry is the analogue of Paris, Juliet’s ill-fated lover; Julie’s best friend Nora takes on the Nurse’s role as Juliet’s confidante; and R’s zombie friend M stands in for Mercutio, Romeo’s friend.
Despite the many character connections, the plot of the story is Isaac Marion’s own original creation. It’s a quirky but moving mixture of science fiction and fantasy, shifting from a fairly straight zombiepocalypse near-future setting to something that is a little more meta, fantastical and symbolic in the end, not to mention heart-warming.
I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a review, along with The New Hunger (the prequel novella) and The Burning World, the 2017 sequel. The publicist was feeling generous, so I totally scored. Lots of reading yet to do, but this first book definitely didn't disappoint.
Content advisory: Though Warm Bodies is classified as a YA book by the publisher (not the author), it contains adult language and themes, and fairly graphic and gruesome violence. Not recommended for younger or more sensitive readers....more
Currently this review is just for "Pagpag" by Samuel Marzioli, free online here at Apex Magazine. Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:
“Pagpag” iCurrently this review is just for "Pagpag" by Samuel Marzioli, free online here at Apex Magazine. Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:
“Pagpag” is a zombie type of tale with a Filipino twist. Recently creatures called the aswang have been terrorizing the country, taking the form of people who have recently died and attacking the living ― most often the family of the dead person whose shape they’ve assumed ― and eating them, sucking their innard through their second tongue, a long, sharp proboscis. Aswang are particularly dangerous because they are lucid, have the memories of the person whose shape they’re in, and can pass for human … until they show their second tongue or attack you. Jay’s young wife Malaya was recently killed by an aswang that took the form of her father. Jay is part of the Night Watch, and patrols the countryside looking for aswang and killing them with his gulok, or machete. But Jay desperately wants to see Malaya one more time, so desperately that he embarks on a highly dangerous search for her aswang, if only so he can tell her goodbye.
In Filipino folklore, an aswang is a shapeshifting creature with characteristics of zombies, vampires, weres and/or ghouls. Pagpag is food that destitute people, like Jay and his family, scavenge by dumpster diving, often eating it even if it has gone bad. Jay told Malaya that it’s called pagpag (which in Tagalog means “to shake off the dust or dirt”) because “we scoop it up and shake the dust off. It’s not what we wanted, but it’s all we have. We come from dust, we live in dust and when we die we go to dust.” Malaya’s aswang is a type of pagpag for him: it’s not what he really wants, but it’s all he has. But what will come of his hunt for this remnant of his wife’s soul?...more
3.5 stars. This is a horror short story, free online at Nightmare Magazine. It's pretty good if you like that kind of read. It won the Nebula and Worl3.5 stars. This is a horror short story, free online at Nightmare Magazine. It's pretty good if you like that kind of read. It won the Nebula and World Fantasy awards back in 1993. This full review was first posted on Fantasy Literature:
An unnamed Army veteran who has a sleep disorder that, oddly, he REALLY wants to keep, reminisces about his experiences in Vietnam twenty years earlier. While in Vietnam, he worked in the Graves division, responsible for handling soldiers’ dead bodies. He describes in detail the disgusting disintegration of bodies that are left in the jungle for more than a few hours.
One day he and Dr. French, the pathologist with whom he works, are called to look at an odd-looking corpse in situ, out in the Vietnamese jungle. The body they’ve been called to examine is that of a native; the soldier thinks it’s from the Montagnard tribe rather than a Vietnamese, and the corpse is oddly desiccated, with teeth filed into points. Things go downhill from there, in a jungle guerilla warfare kind of way, but then some disturbing things happen, and the soldier has never quite been the same since.
For most of the story “Graves” seems like a fairly standard tale of the Vietnam war, somewhat coarse and violent. The twist might not be all that surprising to those who read more in the horror genre, but I have to admit that the ending snuck up and sucker-punched me. ...more
Review first posted on Fantasy Literature. Right now this review is just for the short story "An Ocean the Color of Bruises" by Isabel Yap; I'll probaReview first posted on Fantasy Literature. Right now this review is just for the short story "An Ocean the Color of Bruises" by Isabel Yap; I'll probably add more short fiction reviews later. This story is free online at Uncanny Magazine:
Five old college friends, Heinz, Nina, Rich, Josie and Chino, reunite for a three-day vacation on Punta Silenyo, a small island in Phillipines where, many years ago, a tropical storm killed a large group of high school and college students there for Beach Week.
The tragedy wasn’t real to us. Typical Philippines: large swathes of people cleared out in one go, like a giant hand had slapped them off the earth. Everyone thought Punta Silenyo wouldn’t recover, but even if it never regained its former glamour, people came just the same. Even the ghost–hunting tours stopped after awhile. Death is only one other song often played on these islands.
Even though the island is, curiously, almost deserted, the group of five friends enjoys reconnecting. Heinz and Chino are dating, but the rest haven’t seen each other much lately. They go parasailing, get drunk, and just hang out and enjoy each other’s company … until horror crawls in through the hotel window.
“An Ocean the Color of Bruises” is an oddly introspective horror story. The narrator seems to be the entire group of friends, speaking always as an elusive “we” that is not the viewpoint of any particular person. The terror that they face on Punta Silenyo is just a different type of horror than the despair of their day-to-day lives, where the friends all feel lost and adrift.
This one is for readers who like gruesome horror stories (bonus if you're a fan of Joe Hill). It's free online at Nightmare magazine. I'm not into TwiThis one is for readers who like gruesome horror stories (bonus if you're a fan of Joe Hill). It's free online at Nightmare magazine. I'm not into Twitter (I don't need any more electronic time-sucks in my life) or the horror genre, but this one grabbed me in the end ... in a gory, creepy way.
A teenage girl, Blake, is on a family vacation, and she thinks it's hell (she doesn't know from hell, but just wait). She spends all of her time online, madly tweeting about this terrible vacation she's on and the awful things her parents and brother are doing. The whole story consists solely of tweets.
The story takes a good long while to get rolling, and seriously, I'd unfollow anyone who tweets as often and relentlessly as Blake does. (There are a few subtle hints at What Is To Come that I appreciated.) But on the long drive home her dad decides to stop at a rather odd circus in some out-of-the-way spot (I think they were in Utah, lol; maybe I'd better watch out). And then ... well, read it for yourself, if you like horror and (view spoiler)[zombies (hide spoiler)].
It was written in 2010 (maybe that explains why Hill uses "twittering" rather than "tweeting"?) but was reprinted in Nightmare magazine's May 2016 issue. One of my co-reviewers at Fantasy Literature stumbled onto a link to it on Twitter, lol.
Content advisory: Significant gore and some language....more
Krishna, an Indian man, finds a woman’s corpse when he wades into the river for his mornin3.5 stars. Full review, first posted on Fantasy Literature.
Krishna, an Indian man, finds a woman’s corpse when he wades into the river for his morning bath. He pulls the naked body out of the river and leaves it on the shore, despite the pleas of a priest, who importunes him to dispose of the body properly. Later that day, however, the problem takes care of itself: the woman’s corpse reanimates and walks along the shore, pecked at by crows, the first sign of a worldwide zombie plague. All dead bodies who were not cremated are reanimating, trying to escape from their coffins, or staggering out of the river where their murdered bodies had been dumped:
Some were only days old, looking almost alive but for their slack faces like melting clay masks, their lethal wounds and bruises, their paled and discoloured skin, their jellied eyes and the sometimes lovely frills of clinging white crustaceans in their hair, the tiny flickers of fish leaping from their muddy mouths. Others were black and blue, bloated into terrifying caricatures of their living counterparts, who watched in droves from behind the lines of fearful policemen at the top of the ghat steps.
When Krishna hears that the dead are walking, he feels guilty about how he neglected the woman’s body and rushes off to find it, impelled to do what he can to help her and the other risen dead. He claims the undead woman as his wife, despite her decomposing state and the pressure from police to cremate her, and even allows her to bite him and infect him, staying alive through a constant antibiotic IV drip.
Krishna becomes a locally famous guru, and is later visited by an investigative journalist who is the voice of the rest of this story, as she and we attempt to understand why Krishna is acting as he does: is it selfishness, seeking fame and gifts, or altruism? How are we to treat our own dead family members … and how do we ourselves want to be treated when we die?
This novelette is an unusual take on the zombie apocalypse, from an Indian and rather philosophical point of view. The grotesqueness of the walking dead is a constant, explicitly described visual image, as their bodies continue to deteriorate in nauseating ways, but their plight is nevertheless related with sympathy. Breaking Water raises questions about our humanity without offering any satisfactory answers, leaving me with an unsettled feeling.
Neil Gaiman took one of his twisted, rather creepy fairy tale stories and turned it into a 66 page pFinal review, posted at www.FantasyLiterature.com:
Neil Gaiman took one of his twisted, rather creepy fairy tale stories and turned it into a 66 page picture book with wonderfully whimsical and detailed illustrations by Chris Riddell (who also did the amazing illustrations in the illustrated version of Neverwhere).
[image]
I went out on a limb recommending this to Kelly (and the Book Boar) for her fairy tale retellings project when I was only halfway done with this, but I'm relieved to say I still liked it when I finally finished it last night.
A queen is (reluctantly) about to get married, but when a sleeping sickness spreads through a neighboring kingdom and threatens hers, she sets aside her plans, puts on her mail shirt and sword, and heads off with her dwarf friends to take care of the problem herself. There’s a fascinating, gradual reveal of who the queen actually is, and Gaiman deftly interweaves details about how her past experiences inform her present decisions.
Occasionally it seems like Gaiman is pandering just a bit to readers:
She called for her fiancé and told him not to take on so, and that they would still be married, even if he was but a prince and she a queen, and she chucked him beneath his pretty chin and kissed him until he smiled.
It feels as if he’s trying to display how much he supports female empowerment, which is a great thing except when it gets in the way of the actual story. And I can't say I'm all that sympathetic to the queen's feeling that, because she's getting married and ruling a kingdom for the rest of her life, she has "no choices" and "the path to her death, heartbeat by heartbeat, would be inevitable." Seriously?
But there are some really nice touches to the story--the queen's decisive action when she comes up to the Sleeping Beauty castle, surrounded by deadly thorns that have killed many adventurous men, had me thinking, why didn't any of the guys ever think of doing that? A suitably creepy note is added when it develops that the people struck by the sleeping sickness do more than just sleep. And the detailed pen-and-ink illustrations with touches of gold really made the story. I loved the skull motif, which subtly changes at the end.
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This story may not be amazingly unique--there are a lot of dark fairy tale retellings out there--but between Gaiman's fantastic use of words and imagery, and Riddell's gorgeous illustrations, this is a pretty easy 4 star book for me....more
Who knew that poignant and zombiepocalypse could go together so well?
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"When It Ends, He Catches Her," nominated for the 2014 short story NebulaWho knew that poignant and zombiepocalypse could go together so well?
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"When It Ends, He Catches Her," nominated for the 2014 short story Nebula, is about two ballet dancers, still loving their art and trying to maintain it when everything around them has fallen to pieces.
When the last stages and theaters in the artists' district had barred their doors, when all the performances had gone forever dark, Aisa had found this place, this nameless ghost of a theater. So ramshackle to be beneath the Magistrate's attention, so ruinous that no one had bothered to bolt the doors, it had become her haven, the place she fled to so she could dance by herself in the darkness and the silence. No matter that the world had turned to chaos, in the end, a dancer danced. It was the only peace, the only sanity that remained.
I felt the plight of Aisa and the joy she still takes in her talent.
To say much more would be to spoil it. But the first time I read it I was all, whoa, and the second time I got all choked up.
This zombie apocalypse/superhero mashup isn't bad, but it just isn't grabbing me. I could power through and finish it but I don't really see the pointThis zombie apocalypse/superhero mashup isn't bad, but it just isn't grabbing me. I could power through and finish it but I don't really see the point. Maybe if I were more into zombie tales ...
Very good YA fantasy! The adventures of Sabriel, an innocent young woman, and her run-ins with various types of dead, undead, once dead, sorta dead anVery good YA fantasy! The adventures of Sabriel, an innocent young woman, and her run-ins with various types of dead, undead, once dead, sorta dead and should-be-dead people and creatures. Luckily for almost everyone concerned (except the forces of evil and the dead ones they control), Sabriel is by heritage and training a necromancer, with a fair amount of power over death. Unluckily, some of these once-dead and should-be-dead creatures have apparently killed Sabriel's father, the necromancer-in-chief or "Abhorsen," and are in the process of taking over the kingdom. It's up to Sabriel and her companions, a talking cat with mysterious powers and a once-sorta-dead (for 200 years) guy, to try to turn things around.
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This is a well-written and enjoyable fantasy, occasionally a little on the grim and gruesome side, but still within the bounds of what I'd consider YA appropriate, at least for teens who aren't too sensitive. Garth Nix creates an intriguing and imaginative fantasy world.
This is also the first book in a series, but it doesn't leave you hanging off the edge of the virtual cliff. It works quite well as a stand-alone read. I haven't gotten around to reading the rest of the series, but they're on my "probably, sometime" mental list.
Content notes: Frequent battles with deadly creatures who sometimes resemble zombies. Some good characters die. The sexual content is very mild, but there's a scene where a character overhears lovemaking in the next room, and a somewhat *ahem* detailed description of a naked statue(view spoiler)[ who turns into an actual naked man, but that doesn't lead where you might be pardoned for thinking :) (hide spoiler)]....more
Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽
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