Feed (Newsflesh Trilogy)*
The best horror novels are always about something else. The terror is never really in the monster, because, lets be honest here, they aren't that scary. Not many people wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat worrying about vampires, wolf-men, or zombies. People wake up in a cold sweat worrying about bio-terrorism, a collapsing economy, and losing their homes. Real monsters exist, all we need to do is turn on CNN. This is how Mira Grant (nom de plume for Seanan McGuire) is able to write a lovely political thriller disguised as a book about zombies. She has the ability to weave the two together, and, in the process, creates a heart pounding thriller that had me lugging the book everywhere with me for the past two days. I couldn't put it down.
Feed is a book that juggles knives. It mixes the perfect amount of zombies, a dash or two of campy fun, and heavy doses of chills and thrills together that creates a post apocalyptic world that's familiar and distant at the same time. In the first 50 pages she lays out a world that's either going to be immensely fun or so over the top it falls apart. She walks a razor wire between the two, showing her talent for narrative the whole way though. Her homage to George Romero's zombie movies is lovely. If imitation is a sincerer form of flattery then Grant's final few chapters of Feed should be sending a lovely basket of chocolates to Dawn of the Dead. It's not a ripoff of the movie, it's the reimagining of specific sequences that Hollywood has tried to produce but has utterly failed at creating. She channels Romero like some sort of high end psychic, but uses her own voice to tell her own story. I'd call it a love letter, but that's selling it short. Romero may have helped create the world, but Grant's creativity propels it to an area that's unexplored.
With that being said, Feed is up for a Hugo Award this year, I know I've got four other books to read, but this one is going to be hard to beat. We'll see though, I've been surprised in the past.
Next up is Cryoburn.
* Hey publishers, not that any of you even read this site, (yet) if a book is going to be the first part of a trilogy please put that shit on the COVER. One of my pet peeves is getting 3/4ths of the way though a novel and having the sinking realization that there is no way in hell the author can wrap up the story line in the remaining parts of the book. I had to begrudgingly download the second part to this series and reorder my summer reading because of that. Some of us are on a schedule. *grump*
The best horror novels are always about something else. The terror is never really in the monster, because, lets be honest here, they aren't that scary. Not many people wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat worrying about vampires, wolf-men, or zombies. People wake up in a cold sweat worrying about bio-terrorism, a collapsing economy, and losing their homes. Real monsters exist, all we need to do is turn on CNN. This is how Mira Grant (nom de plume for Seanan McGuire) is able to write a lovely political thriller disguised as a book about zombies. She has the ability to weave the two together, and, in the process, creates a heart pounding thriller that had me lugging the book everywhere with me for the past two days. I couldn't put it down.
Feed is a book that juggles knives. It mixes the perfect amount of zombies, a dash or two of campy fun, and heavy doses of chills and thrills together that creates a post apocalyptic world that's familiar and distant at the same time. In the first 50 pages she lays out a world that's either going to be immensely fun or so over the top it falls apart. She walks a razor wire between the two, showing her talent for narrative the whole way though. Her homage to George Romero's zombie movies is lovely. If imitation is a sincerer form of flattery then Grant's final few chapters of Feed should be sending a lovely basket of chocolates to Dawn of the Dead. It's not a ripoff of the movie, it's the reimagining of specific sequences that Hollywood has tried to produce but has utterly failed at creating. She channels Romero like some sort of high end psychic, but uses her own voice to tell her own story. I'd call it a love letter, but that's selling it short. Romero may have helped create the world, but Grant's creativity propels it to an area that's unexplored.
With that being said, Feed is up for a Hugo Award this year, I know I've got four other books to read, but this one is going to be hard to beat. We'll see though, I've been surprised in the past.
Next up is Cryoburn.
* Hey publishers, not that any of you even read this site, (yet) if a book is going to be the first part of a trilogy please put that shit on the COVER. One of my pet peeves is getting 3/4ths of the way though a novel and having the sinking realization that there is no way in hell the author can wrap up the story line in the remaining parts of the book. I had to begrudgingly download the second part to this series and reorder my summer reading because of that. Some of us are on a schedule. *grump*
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