Zombie fiction has been a remarkably popular (and innovative) category of late—releases like The Strain by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, David Wellington’s Monster trilogy (Monster Island, Monster Nation and Monster Planet), and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith have been mainstays on numerous bestseller lists—but just when I thought that I’d seen the limits of ground-breaking zombie storylines, Feed from Mira Grant (pseudonym for paranormal fantasy author Seanan McGuire) just pushed those margins even farther...
A cool fusion of campy post-apocalyptic zombie horror (George Romero is referred to as “one of the accidental saviors of the human race”) and highly intelligent political thriller a la Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate, Feed—the first installment of Grant’s Newsflesh trilogy—is a surprisingly well-constructed and deeply themed novel. The year is 2039, almost three decades after “the Rising”—essentially the end-of-the-world-as-we-knew-it when two revolutionary cures (for cancer and the common cold) were unleashed upon the world and, after mutating with one another, created a virus that reanimated dead flesh. Now, with the world population dramatically decreased, zombie infestations have turned entire cities and some states (like Alaska) into literal forbidden zones.
In this much-changed world, where the vast majority of humanity lives in fear of infection and rarely leaves the confines of their homes, “a new breed of reality star” has evolved—the blogger/reporter. The blogging community has become the “all-purpose opiate of the new millennium”—“We report the news, we make the news, and we give you a way to escape when the news becomes too much to handle.” The storyline revolves around a team of three intrepid young bloggers who get the opportunity of a lifetime to officially follow a Presidential candidate and cover his bid to become the next leader of the United States. Georgia Mason is a “Newsie”—she reports the news as objectively as possible—while her brother Shaun is an “Irwin,” a thrill-seeking adventurer whose exploits with zombies captivate the millions of housebound viewers, and Georgette “Buffy” Meissonier is a perky, blonde “Fictional,” concentrating on posting her poetry and stories.
But the euphoria surrounding landing their dream gig quickly evaporates after attendees at one of the candidate’s first stops are attacked and killed by zombies and, shortly thereafter, one of the candidate’s daughters is killed in a bizarre mishap when a horse she owned became infected by the virus and attacked. But after the trio of bloggers investigates both scenes, they uncover a horrific truth: the incidents weren’t just coincidental zombie attacks—they were instances of heartless, pre-meditated bio-terrorism. And as they get closer to uncovering the person or persons behind this conspiracy, their lives—and the very future of America—are increasingly put in peril….
“This is the truth: We are a nation accustomed to being afraid. If I’m being honest, not just with you but with myself, it’s not just the nation, and it’s not just something we’ve grown used to. It’s the world, and it’s an addiction. People crave fear. Fear justifies everything. Fear makes it okay to have surrendered freedom after freedom, until our every move is tracked and recorded in a dozen databases the average man will never have access to. Fear creates, defines, and shapes our world, and without it, most of us would have no idea what to do with ourselves.
Our ancestors dreamed of a world without boundaries, while we dream new boundaries to put around our homes, our children, and ourselves. We limit our potential day after day in the name of a safety that we refuse to ever achieve. We took a world that was huge with possibility, and we made it as small as we could.”
Plain and simple, zombie fiction fans should definitely seek out and read this ingenious (and deeply thought-provoking) novel. I'd even recommend this novel to mainstream fiction readers looking for something new—if they don't mind a little rotting flesh in their literary escapism, that is....
Paul Goat Allen has been a full-time book reviewer specializing in genre fiction for almost the last two decades and has written more than 6,000 reviews for companies like Publishers Weekly, The Chicago Tribune, and BarnesandNoble.com. In his free time, he reads.
