“Humanity was gone. There was nothing left but the laugh track.”
– The Panama Laugh by Thomas S. Roche
Although the zombie fiction bubble most definitely popped this year, it doesn’t mean that wildly innovative zombie-powered novels are no longer being released. They’re out there; there are just noticeably far less than in years past – especially 2010, which was nothing short of a historic year for zombie fiction lovers. Dozens of extraordinary novels were released last year (like Feed by Mira Grant, The Loving Dead by Amelia Beamer, Night of the Living Trekkies by Kevin David Anderson and Sam Stall, and Joan Frances Turner’s Dust) that helped to further the boundaries of and effectively redefine zombie fiction.
Thomas S. Roche’s recently released debut novel The Panama Laugh is a perfect example of this ongoing evolution in zombie fiction. It’s an apocalyptic thriller with attitude – a bad attitude, I might add. Revolving around “military contractor” Dante Bogart, a cold-blooded mercenary with a caustic sense of humor who wakes up in a Panamanian jungle with five years inexplicably missing from his memory, the storyline follows Bogart as he slowly regains his memory – and realizes that he is in the middle of a potentially world-ending conspiracy that centers around the development of a “viral-based radical life extension technology for both offensive and defensive military application...”
This technology could also be a part of a grand scheme to depopulate the world – or it could just be science gone terribly wrong. The viral outbreak, which originated in Central America, is killing people all over the world and turning them into the laughing undead:
“They puked out wet sodden streams of death and hunger and anti-mirth, yukking it up to a joke only they found funny. They were much too far away for me to hear them, but I could hear them anyway. I heard them in my nightmares – the kind of nightmares you have while awake. Awake, and naked in the jungle.”
I’ll guarantee you this: you’ll never read a novel quite like The Panama Laugh. It’s certainly an impressively original take on zombie fiction but that’s just the foundation for this multiple-level story – Roche opens the creative floodgates wide and constructs an insanely readable narrative that includes zombie pirates, religious freaks, a San Francisco hacker cult, viral videos, deviant porn, semi-rigid zeppelins, enough weaponry to satisfy the most zealous militant, the Bermuda Triangle, references to Jimmy Buffett, and even a Siberian tiger.
But it’s Roche’s acerbic wit and unrepentantly in-you-face narrative voice that made this novel such a remarkable read for me. There were so many memorable lines, literally hundreds of them – the relentless intensity and narrative “staying power” of The Panama Laugh was very much comparable to Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim saga – and that's saying something.
Here is just a small sampling of what I’m talking about:
• “I shoved the .22 so far up his nose I was pretty much dipsticking his brain. It was at least a quart low.”
• “I almost got bowled over by two mostly blondes chasing each other down the hallway. Both wore dog collars and ball gags. One wore high heels, with the result that the other was gaining on her. But those marble floors were slippery, and the one with the lead was upping the ante by waving twin bottles of intimate lubricant behind her, unloading serpentine strings of it as she ran.”
• “…they [the zombies] tried to come for us, but it was like watching a horde of maggots trying to climb up a rope. If maggots could laugh.”
• “I never let my babies play with Napalm.”
• “The dildos have ears.”
Yes, The Panama Laugh is an exceptional zombie novel – and I highly recommend it for fans of zombie fiction – but to categorize it solely as zombie fiction does the novel a great disservice. Readers who gravitate towards novels with apocalyptic themes will devour this book. Those who enjoy their speculative fiction with a highly irreverent narrative voice will be quoting lines from this novel for weeks to come. Genre fiction fans who enjoy audacious storylines will find Roche’s debut raucously entertaining.
Bravo, Thomas S. Roche. Bravo.
Paul Goat Allen has been a full-time book reviewer specializing in genre fiction for the last two decades and has written thousands of reviews for companies like Publishers Weekly, The Chicago Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, and BarnesandNoble.com. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.
Keep up with all of my blogs – as well as all of Barnes & Noble’s exclusive reviews, authors interviews, videos, promotions, and more – by following @BNBuzz on Twitter!
Great review Paul! I'm very glad that you compare this book to the relentless and magnetically sardonic narratives w/in the Sandman Slim books. Now, I know I'm going to like/love reading The Panama Laugh.
