The Afflicted by Matthew Johnson; Dead
Song by Jay Wilburn; Iphigenia in Aulis by Mike Carey; Pollution by Don Webb; Becca
at the End of the World by Shira Lipkin; The Naturalist by Maureen
F McHugh; Selected Sources for the Babylonian Plague of the Dead (572-571 BCE)
by Alex Dally MacFarlane; What Maisie Knew by David Liss; Rocket
Man by Stephen Graham Jones; The
Day the Music Died by Joe McKinney; The Children’s Hour by Marge Simon; Delice by Holly Newstein;
Trail
of the Dead by Joanne Anderton; The Death and Life of Bob by William
Jablonsky; Stemming the Tide by Simon Strantzas; Those Beneath the Bog by
Jacques I Condor (Maka Tai Meh); What Still Abides by Marie Brennan; Jack and Jill by Jonathan
Maberry; In the Dreamtime of Lady Resurrection by Caitlin R Kiernan; Rigormarole by Michael A Arnzen; Kitty’s
Zombie New Year by Carrie Vaughn; The Gravedigger of Konstan Spring by
Genevieve Valentine; Chew by Tamsyn Muir; ‘Til
Death Do Us Part by Shaun
Jeffrey; There is No “E” in Zombi Which Mean there Can Be No You or We
by Roxanne Gay; What Once We Feared by
Carrie Ryan; The Harrowers by Eric Gregory; Resurgam by Lisa
Mennetti; I Waltzed with a Zombie by
Ron Goulart; Aftermath by Joy Kennedy-O’Neill; A Shepherd of the Valley by
Maggie Slater; The Day the Saucers Came by Neil Gaiman; Love Resurrected by Cat
Rambo; Present by Nicole Kornher-Stace; The Hunt: Before, and the
Aftermath Joe R Lansdale; Bit Rot by Charles Stross
My first impression of this book: 36? Thirty-six? That’s
a vast amount of stories for an anthology! Even 20 would have been pretty big
My second impression: No, really, 36? Seriously?
My third impression: wait, 36 stories and it’s only 480
pages long? How does that work?
Simply, a lot of it doesn’t – we have some frankly weird,
surreal, barely related and generally random filler fluff pieces some of which
defy me even commenting on them because I have no idea why they’re there other
than to pad an already hugely stuffed book – so The Day the Saucers Came is just some randomness that barely
covers two pages and is only, at best, tangentially related to the theme (or
any theme for that matter), The Children’s Hour is a poem and
not a particularly good one. Rigormarole feels like a tiny scrap
that was edited out of a longer book and is kind of lost and pointless without
the rest
But then we get down to the inherent problem of zombies
and short stories. Now, I know I’ve said before that I’m generally not a huge
fan of short stories anyway – and I hold on to that. A short story is usually
too short to establish characters, world or a decent plot line, so often it
relies on lots of info dump and no plot, lots of short cuts or relies on a lot
of prior knowledge of a longer series. Then we get to zombies – there’s
actually not a lot you can do with zombies. Oh, you can switch around the
origin and nature and properties of zombies but, ultimately, a zombie is
generally a rapacious killing machine with low intellect and (usually) both
spreads rapidly and is made up of our former loved ones. Most zombie stories
actually focus less on zombies and more on the characters reacting to grief,
shock, horror, struggling to survive, etc etc – look at most zombies stories
out there: from The Walking Dead to World War Z, most of the time zombie
stories are about the people in an apocalypse
Which is damn hard to do in a short story – because you
have a few short words in which to make me care enough about this person and
the situation they’re in. Worse, you have a few short words to make me care
enough about this person and the situation we’re in while 30+ other stories
have already tried to convince me about their person in, basically, the same
situation. It’s hard not to reach story 30 and not think “can you just be eaten
already so I can get to the next one?”
So a lot of these stories rely on the emotional horror of
loss in a dystopian. Some work and some not so much. Becca at the End of the World manages a very real emotional impact
with a mother facing her 16 year old daughter turning in front of her, but it
also feels heavy handed. I mean, we have a mother watching her child turn
zombie – you’d have to be a horrendously awful writer not to make that
emotional. I found it both very impactful but also kind of lazy – the easy
route. I also thought Jack and Jill with its comparisons of zombiehood to terminal illness (and
presenting someone with cancer – and in remission no less - as being,
effectively, the living dead) both problematic and, again, a way of forcing
emotional impact by hammering it in. Shepherd of the Valley was a man in
a zombie apocalypse with a rather unique way of dealing with things but the
story primarily centred around his sadness for his daughter which just wasn’t that well conveyed- lots of
moping with an odd setting. Which also kind of describes Love Resurrected; it’s a fantasy
setting with the twist of a “zombie” point of view – but there was too much
distraction from character development to get any real emotion out of the
character
I found Present much more effective, the story of a teenaged mother struggling to
survive with her toddler, her doubts, her fears, her drive to keep moving and
her tragedy were much more impactful for me. What Once we Feared was even better – the psychological
collapse of a group of survivors into gradual despair and the toll that took –
beyond zombies attacking, beyond fighting for survival – just the despair of
the helplessness, the hopelessness of it slowly eating away at them. That was
powerful.
While many authors tried to hinge on the emotional impact
of the survivors, others tried to move away from the whole “the world is
falling apart and we are surviving” zombie apocalypse scenario and did so to
various degrees of effectiveness.
Delice returns more to the roots of
zombiedom (or one of the roots – voodoo) in a way – but it’s a story I’ve seen
before several times – the brutal story of Delphine LaLaurie
(with names changed, but basically the same story including the slave jumping
off the roof, the attic and the name Delphine) which, as
I’ve said before, I’m uncomfortable with being appropriated for fiction –
and equally
how the idea of persecuted groups having woo-woo with which to exact revenge is
a nice fantasy but it draws a veil over a very often unanswered injustice.
Chew explored the idea of a zombie
rising up in revenge – it was a different setting (post World War 2 Germany)
but I think the urge to show a different viewpoint distracted too far from the
story.
Kitty’s Zombie New Year is a story I’ve already read in Kitty’s
Greatest Hits, I liked it not just because it was fun but because it
hailed back even more to one of the origins of zombiehood – zombiehood as a way
of drugging a living person. The same applies to the extremely creepy and twist
ending of There is No “E” in Zombi Which Mean there Can Be No You or We: zombiehood
as a way of controlling people. It seems odd to say returning to one of the
origins is a nice twist – but it is.
Other stories that managed to be truly original were Those
Beneath the Bog drawing on the legends of First Nations Canadians in a
viewpoint we very very rarely see in the genre; it was well done, fascinating,
creepy and bringing in a wonderful nuanced conflict of still holding old
traditions but also being, for example, Catholic. It was definitely one of the
good ones.
As was What Still Abides for style is
nothing else – the whole saga style of writing really worked without being
repetitive or contrived – and the legend of the wight cursing the land is
definitely a different take on the undead – though a bit of a stretch on the
word “zombie.” It was definitely worth it though
I don’t think Bit Rot worked for me – it’s zombies in space. Changing what makes zombies – whether it’s a virus or a curse or nanites or androids or whatever, doesn’t really fundamentally change the nature of zombie stories. This has just kind of taken a pretty standard zombie story and moved it to space; the different reasons don’t change the same plot. What is much more interesting is the backstory before the zombies get involved; the idea of a rich woman creating clones to live vicariously through – give me more of that story and drop the zombies! Similarly Resurgam tries to draw on Victorian era body-stealing but with shifting time lines and really dodgy characterisation I think it failed both to bring anything original and even to be that coherent a story.
The different setting works better with Selected
Sources for the Babylonian Plague of the Dead (572-571 BCE) but more because of the way it’s told –
the historic setting, archaeological finds and letters between the sisters that
add originality even while the base story is very expected.
For me, the truly original stories in this book were the
ones that delved more into the societal and cultural implications of a zombie
apocalypse – because that’s not something I’ve seen very often outside of Mira
Grant’s Newsflesh series – and these
were generally very well done. Such as The Afflicted – the idea of not
knowing exactly what causes the undead, or having the whole population infected
and ready to rise is a topic we’ve seen a few times; but rarely have we seen
the full consequences of that. This story explores some of those worrisome
consequences as the population persecutes and ostracises the elderly, driving
them out into camps away from civilisation because they are prone to
zombie-dom. In a genre full of complete societal collapse, it’s intriguing to
see a world where we don’t have complete collapse – but we do have brutal, even
horrific responses to a major crisis (which is not ahistorical – internment,
persecution and scapegoating run rampant when there’s a crisis).
Dead Song goes even further – delving into the cultural ramifications of a
zombie apocalypse. It’s an amazing story told after the recovery and has a real
fascinating idea about social changes after the apocalypse, particularly
through music. Survivor communities forcing disparate groups to live together,
isolated for extended periods of time creating a whole new culture and musical
styles out of it. I loved it, the concept is both so original and so
excellently true – the idea of basic cultural shifts like this after a zombie
apocalypse is so rarely explored. Exploring our own cultural conflicts we also have
Iphigenia
in Aulis taking the current push of anti-choice politics and applying
it to unborn zombie foetus. It’s a complex and really quite beautifully tragic
story of self-aware, gentle, sweet, but dangerous children and questions about
their humanity. But the prize for this has to go to Aftermath – the story of
a world that has recovered from a zombie apocalypse. A world where zombies have
been cured, where everything is being out back together – and the survivors
have live with their trauma, their PTSD – and the knowledge that some of the
people around them were once cannibalistic zombies who killed their loved ones.
That was a very good one
We did have a few stories that explored the idea of
zombies as non-threatening to various degrees of success. ‘Til Death Do us Part is
a quietly tragic tale of the recently bereaved having their lost loved one
returning to them – as an insensible, ambulatory corpse. What do you do with
that? How do you deal with that?
But most seem to focus on the use and abuse of zombies: Pollution,
What
Maisie Knew and The Hunt: Before, and the Aftermath
all explore how we would abuse and torment zombies, enslave zombies and
generally make them into tools. They make interesting comments on
dehumanisation and are probably an inevitable comment on the cruelty and
inhumanity of mankind. There does seem to be a rather strange obsession with
raping zombies; is raping corpses that high on people’s to-do-list? And I think
What
Maisie Knew was especially gratuitous not just in the people’s actions
but creating world setting where zombies
become lucid when raped – I can’t even begin to address the why of that.
What’s left are some of the tangential stories that work
to a greater or lesser degree. Usually, to be honest, lesser. I
loved The Death and Life of Bob
with its rather heavy handed commentary on prejudice and hating and fearing
the Other – but it did bring a really new story (and Marlene is the most
awesome boss ever.)
The Day the Music Died and I
Waltzed with a Dead Man both seem to not really need zombies – they’re
both commentaries on their industries (both about the lengths people go to for
money and success in the entertainment industry –both of which could replace
zombie with just about anything). They made pretty powerful statements in their
own way about dehumanisation, skewed morality and how little people mattered
compared to prophets (one particularly jarring scene has two men arguing about
the ethics of “selling out” while casually drugging a woman to be fed to a
zombie – “selling out” is the greater outrage than killing a woman).
In the Dreamtime of Lady Resurrection
has a lot of supremely beautiful, elaborate language, a very unique 2nd
person perspective… and no real plots. It felt like a prologue to something
else, to an actual story, with the hyper-elaborate language used to disguise
that. I felt something similar with both Trail of the Dead Necromancer Curse
and Harrowers:
both struck me as interesting introductions to much longer stories in much
broader worlds – this leaves me both intrigued and a little frustrated because
there’s not enough here to make a full story.
Then we have the bizarre. Sometimes I think a story is
trying to make a great big Important Moral Point or observation or… well…
something and zombies seem to lend themselves to this use as metaphor; but
sometimes it loses me. Naturalist uses zombified states as
a prison camp with the protagonist deciding to study the zombies like a macabre
and murderous David Attenborough – but I’m not sure what is actually trying to
be achieved here? Or how people are worse than zombies? I’m not at all sure. Rocketman
I just have no clue about – baseball using a zombie to impress a girl and…
what? Similarly Stemming the Tide may be a comment on the general uselessness
of humanity. Or the evils of misanthropy. Maybe both. Also, sea zombies because
reasons.
Which leaves me with The Gravedigger of Konstan Spring which
had absolutely nothing to do with zombies but was immense fun and I just giggle
at the idea of a town of immortals hiring a gravedigger they don’t need
because, damn it, a respectable town needs a gravedigger.
This review is getting long because of the vast number of
stories – but social justicewise we have mixed. There are a number of female
characters and female leads to many of these stories, with considerable female
power and skill displayed (The Death and Life of Bob, Selected
Sources for the Babylonian Plague of the Dead (572-571 BCE), Iphigenia in Aulis
and Present particularly come to mind). But this book also has a
truly surprising amount of rape, usually against women (except There
is No “E” in Zombi Which Mean there Can Be No You or We where a man was
the victim) which feels gratuitous to say the least; though while What
Maisie Knew is the most grautiotus – it also sets up a clear conseuqnece
by the end of the book and it has an interesting dynamic of a guy who is clearly
an awful person, unambiguously so, while at the same time hiss viewpoint shows
he doesn’t see himself that way. It’s an interesting commentary on how bad
people are not the moustachioed twirling villains. There’s also a lot of
mistress-blaming for infidenlity in The Hunt: Before, and the Aftermath – it’s
the whole point of the story. The Day the Music Died has a lot of
disposable women – which I think may be the point of the story, that these
women’s lives mean so very little to the characters they’re used to express the
inhumanity of the protagonists
Several of these stories have POC protagonists: Selected
Sources for the Babylonian Plague of the Dead (572-571 BCE) (set in
ancient Babylon), Delice (set in slavery
era New Orleans with lots of voodoo), There is No “E” in Zombi Which Mean there
Can Be No You or We (set in Haiti with more voodoo). Those
Beneath the Bog is set in Canada with First Nations people and really
well done. Rocket Man also has a Native American protagonist – but it
seems only to be there for some dubious “jokes.” Several of the books have
numerous POC background characters or secondary characters, including Naturalist
where Black people form one of the few sources of order in the camp. Pollution
is set in Japan and has some great side messages about fetishising culture,
about putting a culture on a pedestal and about thinking you truly know or are
part of a culture because you are such a big fan of it.
On LGBT inclusion: The Day the Music Died has a gay
character that is constantly derided for his crush on a straight zombie that
continually leads him to do pathetic, weak and plain foolish and nigh suicidal
things until he’s finally eaten. This is accompanied by a lot of contempt.
There are no other LGBT characters but thick dollops of homophobia in Naturalist
and Pollution
just thrown in there because random gay slurs are so damn vital it seems.
So, in summation – this book has some excellent stories (The
Death and Life of Bob), some deep stories (Aftermath) and some very
fun stories (The Gravedigger of Konstan Spring) and because they’re so good (and
a lot of the others are very decent) it is worth getting for them alone – but there’s
also a lot of filler, a lot of padding and a lot of stories that could be
cheerfully ripped wout of this book without reducing the quality even slightly.
Less is more definitely applies. I’m going to give this a highly qualified 4
Fangs – some of it is excellent, but the quality is most definitely not
consistent.
