Positive: A Novel by David Wellington (Harper Voyager) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

More than a mark: lesson on compassionate leadership disguised as zombie story.

During his westward journey, exile Finnegan (aka Finn) encounters a large sign that says, “The world takes.” It’s a fitting summary for the post-apocalyptic world he traverses, a world full of zombies and even more dangerous predators of the human variety. 

Zombie Apocalypse: Acapulcalypse Now by Alison Littlewood | review by Stephen Theaker

Despite the painfully punning title, Zombie Apocalypse: Acapulcalypse Now (Robinson) is not a spoof, in fact it’s quite the gorefest, almost a paperback nasty. It takes place in the shared world created by editor Stephen Jones and his collaborators in the typographically inventive anthology or mosaic novel Zombie Apocalypse. Happily this one doesn’t have any difficult-to-read handwritten passages, though it does have lots of italics, for emphasising words, for thoughts, for Spanish phrases. The Monumento que Canta, an ancient ruin, has been plucked from its original location and placed on the top of an ersatz pyramid near Acapulco: a theme resort, the Hotel Baktun. As new staff and the first guests arrive, it’s not long before reports come in of serious problems back in London, of plague pits discovered under cemetaries and “members of the public reportedly biting and scratching each other”.

Wicked Weeds by Pedro Cabiya | review by Stephen Theaker

This book (Mandel Vilar Press pb, 256pp, $16.95) begins with a warning: there are two ways of reading it, and both are a bad idea. The diligent reader who consumes each page in its usual order is on a road to chaos, which isn’t very appealing, so this reviewer took the second option: following the directions of the contents page. That takes us first to all the police interviews, then the personal journal of the unnamed, self-professed and supposed zombie at its centre, then the scientific explanations for his condition, and finally a series of field notes. This adds a degree of choose-your-own-adventure interactivity to the book, letting the reader shuffle through its pages like an investigator or a judge looking for evidence.

Warm Bodies – reviewed by Douglas J. Ogurek

Introspective zombies? Hell yeah! R, the zombie protagonist of Warm Bodies (directed by Jonathan Levine), moves his finger in a circular motion and mumbles “more real” (I think it was) to explain to love interest Julie (a human) his preference for vinyl records. In this simple gesture, R captures the message of the zombie apocalypse/romantic comedy crossover Warm Bodies.

In an era of texting and tweeting and so many other technological temptations, this film gives credence to something that has taken a backseat in recent years: the face-to-face, technology-free relationship.

The Walking Dead, Season 1 - reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Post-apocalyptic programmes don't tend to do very well. Jericho, Jeremiah, The Survivors (both versions), The Tripods, Three Moons Over Milford, etc – not many have made it past or even reached a third series. After all, just how miserable do you want to make yourself just before bedtime? But The Walking Dead is good enough that it might just buck the trend. The six-episode first season certainly looks great. Occasional shots of massed CG zombies are used sparingly, physical make-up being more frequent. The story follows young police officer Rick Grimes as he emerges from hospital and makes contact with other survivors. This Life’s Andrew Lincoln makes an excellent lead and the rest of the cast is just as good. In Frank Darabont, director of The Shawshank Redemption and The Mist, the programme has a showrunner to die (and then return from the grave) for.

Outpost by Adam Baker – reviewed

When the skeleton crew of a derelict oil rig in the Arctic Ocean begin to see TV news footage of food riots and carnage in cities across Europe, they begin to suspect that the relief ship scheduled to bring them home is not coming after all. Things quickly worsen, and soon the rig is cut off from all outside contact with the long night of Arctic winter closing in.

Adam Baker's taut, stripped-down writing style resembles a film-script more than it does a novel, although for thriller writers this is now the dominant mode. Many of his paragraphs will start with a terse, "C Deck. Dark, frozen passageways" or "The powerhouse. A steady hum from Generator Three" as though this were actually a part-novelised film script rather than a continuous piece of prose. Still, it keeps up the pace, and one cannot deny that Baker has a very disciplined, lean style. There's a relentless, cinematic focus on the action, switching efficiently between different characters as they grapple with various engineering problems aboard the rig and on the ice. Just now and then the author feels the need to state the obvious by putting into one of the characters' mouths the question that should really have been implied, and which any astute reader would be asking themselves already.

Night of the Living Trekkies, Kevin Anderson and Sam Stall

Zombies wouldn't really be that big a threat in the Star Trek universe – they're basically disorganised, disconnected, weaponless Borg who wouldn't even be able to pilot a starship! Dr Crusher or the emergency medical hologram would take minutes to whip up a retrovirus to sort them out. Perhaps that's why the living dead in this book aren't zombies in the ordinary sense. What they are exactly is revealed in the course of the book; what they do is infest a Star Trek convention, as well as the surrounding city, leaving security chief and former soldier Jim Pike (get it?) with very few options in his efforts to save his little sister.

This is straightforward silly entertainment, with few ambitions beyond raising a chuckle, giving the odd thrill, and diverting the reader for a few hours. It's not a laugh riot – the tone is primarily serious – but there are lots of in-jokes. Like the hero's name they aren't particularly clever ones: a hotel named Botany Bay doesn't make much sense when it isn't in Botany Bay. The chapters take their names from Star Trek episode titles. Most of the best lines are lifts from Star Trek or Star Wars dropped into appropriate situations, but others caught my eye too. "He'd only just met this guy, but he'd already disliked him for years," says Pike of sleazebag Matt.

It's not all that frightening – apart from one brilliant scene where zombies in nearby buildings notice the survivors through the hotel windows - but the action moves quickly and efficiently. Klingon merchant Martock is at the convention to sell replica weaponry, and the survivors put the bat'leth and lirpa to good use. Pike is a resourceful and compassionate hero, with only one blind spot: for some reason, though he discovers early on that taser shocks have an explosive effect on the infections, he doesn't think of applying this method to fresh bites to prevent people turning.

There is a very good sense of place, with the hotel's layout being used cleverly. For example, using the stairwells to get around is a good plan, since the zombies struggle with doors – but what if the fire door on one floor was left open and zombies spilled out from that floor? Another sequence where the survivors move through a series of interconnected rooms is strategically intriguing, each room presenting a new challenge, the heroes learning from their early mistakes.

This isn't an official tie-in, and "any personnel claiming otherwise will be sentenced to one year of hard labour in the penal colony of Rura Penthe", but I doubt that will prevent it from finding appreciative readers among Trek fans. Once you've seen the cover and chuckled at the concept, actually reading the book doesn't add a great deal, but for what it is, it is done well, and if you like the idea enough to consider buying the book you're unlikely to be disappointed.

Night of the Living Trekkies, Kevin Anderson and Sam Stall, Quirk Books, pb, 254pp. Reviewed from a paperback ARC.

What Will Come After, Scott Edelman

What Will Come After is a collection of very literary zombie stories – and one excellent play – from Scott Edelman. The stories aren't interconnected, but they are more or less consistent in their approach to zombification. It isn't a plague passed on by bites – in most of the stories everyone who has recently died returns to life; undeath, rather than death, becomes the complementary state to life. (Understanding this helps to make sense of the first story, in which otherwise it's not clear how the narrator knows he is about to change.) Each zombie is extremely strong, able to rip humans and animals apart, and in most of the stories they display a shark-life sense for discovering their prey. In most the world goes on living, more or less, people coping (or not) with this new disaster just as they coped (or didn't) with all the others.

The collection begins with "What Will Come After", a stunning, poetic tale told in the future tense, where a writer describes what will happen after he turns. In "Live People Don't Understand" a young wife wakes to find herself beneath the ground, and decides upon revenge. "The Man He Had Been Before" concerns domestic violence. People find it hard enough to leave abusive partners in our world; how much harder to do it after the apocalypse? "Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man" finds a writer holed up in a library, in which he writes story after story, trying to find some kind of sense to it all. In a way it's the most traditional zombie story in the collection, with a protagonist ensconced in an impromptu fortress, having to make decisions about when and how to venture outside, but it's also the most expansive and playful of the stories.

"Live People Don't Understand" is built upon the plot and characters of "Our Town", a play by Thornton Wilder, and two of the very best pieces here also play with earlier texts. "Tell Me Like You Done Before" is a superb sequel to Of Mice and Men, which sees poor George pursued by undead mice and men across the dustbowls. Recommended to anyone who thought Steinbeck's ending too cheery. "A Plague on Both Your Houses" is a play in five short acts, a Romeo and Juliet of the living and the undead which I would love to see performed. (My own impromptu performance went down badly with the family.) Recommended to anyone who thought Shakespeare's ending too sad.

The remaining stories suffer only in comparison to the high standards of this collection; in most other books they would have been outstanding. In "Goobers" a projectionist working in a cinema showing nothing but zombie films finds an unusually appreciative audience, but the abrupt ending didn't satisfy. "The Human Race" concerns a woman who lost her family in the London 7/7 bombings, and learns to live again when surrounded by the dead. "The Last Supper" is eaten by the zombie who hunts down the last living human, in a story that reflects, I think, our own overwhelming greed with regard to the resources of our planet.

Stories like "Tell Me Like You Done Before" and John Kessel's "Pride and Prometheus" demonstrate that what's come to be known dismissively as the mash-up isn't the sole domain of quick cash-in artists; in the right hands it can produce works of art that have value beyond a catchy title and a chucklesome cover. This book shows, if it needed to be shown, that while we can in complete fairness be dismissive of particular books, and even dismayed by particular trends in publishing, it's always, always a mistake to dismiss an entire category of fiction. What Will Come After stands as an outstanding example of the literary potential of genre fiction.

What Will Come After, Scott Edelman, PS Publishing, hb, 194pp. Reviewed from a pdf ARC. Available in the PS Publishing store.

Is the apocalypse too depressing for TV?

Like almost everyone else, I loved episode one of The Walking Dead. So why haven't I got around to watching episode two yet? For that matter, why did I never get around to watching season two of Jeremiah, or those last half dozen episodes of Jericho? I didn't get more than five minutes into Survivors!

I've read lots of post-apocalypse books and comics, and watched lots of post-apocalypse films. Usually I love that stuff. Give me a radioactive wasteland and a band of hungry mutants and I'm happy as Larry. I don't mind being made miserable once in a while – it's bracing! – but I think I'm reluctant to sign up for something that'll make me unhappy week-in, week-out.

I don't think it's just me: I was trying to think of a post-apocalypse programme that lasted more than three seasons, and didn't have much luck:

The Survivors - 3 series
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century - 2 seasons
The Tripods - 2 series
Jeremiah - 2 seasons
Three Moons Over Milford - 1 season
Jericho - 1.5 seasons
Survivors (remake) - 2 series

Maybe the problem is that the apocalypse is a nice place for a holiday, but not somewhere you'd like to live. TV shows become a part of the fabric of your life, and perhaps the apocalypse isn't well-suited to that.

The only programme I've been able to think of that broke the curse was the remake of Battlestar Galactica, which began with a nuclear holocaust and lasted five seasons (if you include the mini-series). Perhaps because, although it was gruelling and miserable, it was so good you couldn't possibly miss it.

I'm pretty sure I'll keep watching The Walking Dead until they stop making it, but, like BSG, it'll probably be one of those programmes I save up and watch in bursts.

Have I missed any programmes that lasted longer? Is The Walking Dead doomed to a fatal second season drop-off in the ratings, or can quality win out, like it did with BSG?

Blood Oath: The President's Vampire, Christopher Farnsworth

Nathaniel Cade is a vampire, bound by voodoo since 1867 to serve the President and his officers, to "support and defend the nation and its citizens against all enemies, foreign and domestic". A lost extract from the Nixon tapes establishes that the curse leaves Cade to decide for himself who are the enemies of the United States – good news for Woodward and Bernstein! And if the President himself was an enemy of the United States? We may find out in future novels. In this one Cade faces both types of enemies: while terrorists steal body parts from soldiers' corpses and send them to the US for purposes unknown, shadowy conspirators take the opportunity to strike at Cade and his colleagues.

In this kitchen-sink cosmos almost everything fantastical is real, especially the stuff from the movies – vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein monsters, zombies, etc – though there's a scientific basis to it all, we're told. Early chapters are highly reminiscent of the first Hellboy film, even down to the callow POV agent. Zach Barrows, a self-described "useless douche-nozzle", thinks his new assignment's a punishment for naughtiness with the President's daughter, but by the end he's earned his place in the book – and by Cade's side.

The narrative takes the over-traditional Highlander approach – passages in the present, intercut occasionally with relevant episodes from the past – but with 70 chapters that average under six pages it can't help being punchy. The opening left me expecting a Clancy or McNab style military thriller, but the bulk is much more like 24, with crooked agents, conspiracies, power struggles, big shocks and chains of responsibility that lead all the way to the top. It's a lot of nonsense, but it's often very exciting. Farnsworth takes a canny approach to his finale, gambling upon a small number of very tough enemies where many writers would have gone for a horde, making for an tense, tactical battle that really tests his heroes.

Blood Oath: The President's Vampire, Christopher Farnsworth, Hodder & Stoughton, tpb, 398pp.

Flirt, by Laurell K. Hamilton

Anita Blake is a lady with a lot of barnacles. She's accumulated many powers in her previous seventeen books, and to a new reader their page-by-page introduction in this one seemed almost ludicrous. Vampire hunter, necromancer, werewolf (sort of) (and were-lots of other things), vampire, another vampire's human servant (and girlfriend), and succubus, she keeps a pet were-leopard and werewolf, and she's a US Marshal.

But imagine reading your first Superman comic: okay, this guy can fly. Oh, and he's super-strong, invulnerable, and shoots lasers out of his eyes. Plus, he has super-hearing, and he's a super-ventriloquist, and even a super-kisser! We're so used to Superman that we hardly question it. What matters is how all the powers coalesce into a character. What's interesting about Anita's powers is that none are free: with each comes new dangers, new feelings, and new responsibilities. She's in constant danger of being overwhelmed by them.

With great power also comes great difficulty in plotting: how to challenge the hero who has everything? In Flirt we see Superman's worst nightmare: friends targeted by supervillains. Mr Bennington wants his wife back from the dead, and doesn't care who dies to make it happen. With snipers stalking her lovers Anita lets herself be kidnapped by a pair of mercenary were-lions. A were-lion witch cuts her psychic connection with her chums, and things are looking grim. But the bad guys have reckoned without Anita's greatest power of all: her ravenous sexual energy!

A few chapters in and this was well on the way to being one of the worst books I'd read in years. The second chapter is dreadful, the banter excruciating as Anita and her gaggle of boyfriends flirt with a waiter and each other in a restaurant. The tone felt familiar - jaunty, forced, creepy - and it took a while to place it: late period Heinlein. Discovering in the afterword that the scene was based on real events made it even worse. What these characters call "playing", other people might well call sexual harassment.

But once Anita's love cult is sidelined the book got much, much better. It develops into an interesting sexual thriller, Anita's respectful kidnappers fighting their own desire to mate with her, and pack dynamics play out in human form as she plays them off against each other. Overall, this is a crisp, pointed novel that doesn't outstay its welcome, and if I could forget that indulgent second chapter I'd be happy to read another in the series, preferably one in which Anita is once again separated from her gormless gang of group-huggers.

Flirt, by Laurell K. Hamilton, Headline, pb, 180pp.

Also published this week: the 19th Anita Blake novel, Bullet, in which Anita must face the Mother of All Darkness, who is after her body... Though not for the reason everyone else is.

Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter, by A.E. Moorat

King William IV is dead, and Princess Victoria takes the throne aged eighteen. England and its monarch are threatened by the forces of darkness (among them the King of Belgium); luckily the new queen has supernaturally quick reflexes and is handy with bladed weapons… Essentially this is Queen Victoria as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, dealing with monsters, boys, evil plots and a hard-ass mentor.

The cover of this book is fantastic, and its tag line is magnificent: “She loved her country. She hated zombies.” Maybe, but it’s p.136 before she meets one, and she only spends about seven pages fighting them in total, being mostly occupied by werewolves. Clearly the zombie angle has been (smartly) played up for commercial reasons.

This is lightly plotted Kim-Newman-esque fun. Little is resolved by the end, and there’s sometimes a sense of characters being moved around like pieces on a board, but those characters, especially Lord Quimby and his dead manservant Perkins, are good ones. Though you don’t have to read this book to get its best joke, there are others, e.g. monster hunters named Hicks, Vasquez and Hudson. Don’t be too disappointed if this turns up in your Christmas stocking.

Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter, A.E. Moorat, Hodder, pb, 376pp

Deadgirl

Rickie and JT discover a naked woman (owner of the most revolting merkin this side of The League of Gentlemen) chained up in an abandoned hospital. JT says they should keep her, and Rickie leaves him to it. He thinks about ringing the police, but mum’s boyfriend interrupts so he doesn’t bother…

The girl is a zombie, not that it’s relevant to the plot. This is a rape film, about a rapist and the pal who doesn’t turn him in, and the other guys they invite to take a turn. Sex with a zombie, if not precisely consensual, you might say, is strictly speaking necrophilia rather than rape – the horror equivalent of a sci-fi sexbot! – but consider that before having sex with this zombie JT has to beat her to death because she’s fighting back too much. (That’s how he discovers her secret.)

Of course you can have good films about bad people – is this a good film? It’s atmospheric and sombre, and for those handy with the remote, it has two good pause-the-video moments, including a surprisingly vigorous bowel movement. JT develops into a very creepy villain, especially once he stops wearing trousers, and other than the sound editing – always important for a horror movie – Noah Segan’s performance is the best thing about the movie.

But no, for me this wasn’t a good film. It felt like a film written by sex-starved teenagers (it actually comes from the pen of Trent Haaga, previously responsible for Toxic Avenger IV), or at least to appeal to them. It doesn’t rise above the level of a teenage conversation: “Imagine if we had a zombie to shag?” “Yeah, but imagine all the problems keeping it clean.”

And the problem with the film isn’t just that the characters are immoral people doing terrible things, it’s that nothing they do makes sense. For example, one guy who knows just how dangerous the dead girl is decides to free her on his own, with predictable consequences – and then another guy does exactly the same thing later in the movie. Having said that, the movie’s second best moment does result from its very stupidest behaviour, though I’d be surprised if it makes it to the commercial release of the DVD, given the tumescent area out of which the dead girl takes an entirely justifiable bite.

Though Deadgirl has horror movie elements – such as characters with uniformly poor decision-making skills – at heart it’s an indie film about teenage power and powerlessness, with more in common with films like Brick or Bully than Dawn of the Dead. So don’t expect to be frightened – except by a rather scary dog – just revolted.

Deadgirl: the zombie rape film you haven’t been waiting for…

Deadgirl, Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel (dirs).

World War Z, Max Brooks

Subtitled “An oral history of the zombie war”, World War Z tells the story from the initial outbreaks to the ongoing aftermath. Brooks wastes no time trying to reimagine or justify the existence of zombies. There’s no scientific analysis of why their bite conveys the infection, or how their dead bodies can move. They are the zombies from Night of the Living Dead, plain and simple, with just the one difference. Here, only the infected rise from the dead; the previously dead stay where they are. The book is not about how a real world zombie apocalypse might happen, but instead about how the real world would respond to Romero’s zombies.

Having said that, Brooks does come up with a number of new (to me, at least) twists on the way the zombie plague spreads, none of which I’ll mention here for fear of spoiling someone else’s enjoyment of the book. I’ll just say that the best such story, for me, is told in Brazil.

World War Z has a lot in common with James Herbert’s Rats trilogy, though where Herbert has an onmiscient narrator floating around to take us to the most interesting bits, everything here is reported first hand by the survivors. That might be thought to lessen the suspense, since we know they survive, but that’s far from the truth – there’s a very real sense that surviving this war was much harder than dying in it. Hearing the stories straight from the survivors is what gives the book its power and purpose, dragging us right in amongst the moaning hordes.

I had a few small issues with it. For one thing, it’s a bit irksome to have the old nonsense about “no atheists in foxholes” getting trotted out, even in a first person narrative. The American soldiers in the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, for example, get very angry when people say things like that. It’s also amusing to see how often people from around the world say things along the lines of “As your great American writer once said…”, which often makes it seem as if the quotes were in place first and the character saying them came later.

And I’m not convinced by how safe any safe zones could possibly have been, especially early in the war. I enjoy the odd zombie movie here and there, but I find them very depressing, because there’s no way anyone would survive (unless, as in 28 Days Later, the zombies would eventually run out of steam). Given the horrifying way that things play out in the early sections of this book, I’m not convinced that anyone at all would have made it out alive.

But those are minor quibbles with regard to a powerful book. It’s so full of fascinating and terrifying episodes that everyone reading it will have their own favourite moment – for me it was the fleeting mention of the Queen and her castle. I’m far from being a monarchist, but that was cool. Also, Brooks is to be commended for fitting the whole saga into a mere 340 pages. I’ve no doubt that the resulting insensity has contributed to the book’s success.

I’m definitely looking forward to the movie.

World War Z, Max Brooks, Duckworth, pb, 344pp.