surprisedAnd then there is me.
A review of my book. In this magazine.
Sometimes this business of writing continues to astonish me. I know, I know: I worked hard, I worked for a long time, this isn't all being handed to me on platters by magical ponies from the moon (which is really a pity, as I would love to catch me some magical moon ponies of my very own). I don't sit here feeling like I'm getting things I shouldn't have...even if I do occasionally wonder when I'm going to wake up from this astonishingly detailed linear dream.
My book is reviewed in a magazine that includes a review of a Resident Evil movie and a television show based on the works of Stephen King. If there was any actual question of whether or not I may have accidentally sold my soul at the crossroads, this pretty much answers it.
Good thing I keep a fiddler around, huh?
Golly.
***
FEED
Yes, it's another zombie novel. But there's something odd about this one, something that might prick the back of your neck with resonant familiarity. Witness this paragraph from fairly late in the proceedings, as our determined heroine Georgia Mason attends a formal occasion.
"Men's formal attire is sensible: pants, suit coats, cummerbunds. Even ties can be useful, since they work as makeshift tourniquets or garrotes. Women's formal attire, on the other hand, hasn't changed since the Rising; it still seems designed to get the people wearing it killed at the earliest opportunity. Screw that. My dress was custom-made. The skirt is breakaway, the bodice was fitted to allow me to carry a recorder and a gun, and there's a pocket concealed at the waist for extra ammo..."
Sense anything familiar about that matter-of-fact practicality, that flavor of resourcefulness and competence? The "so what" casualness of it all? No? Well, let's underline what we're talking about: Feed, set a couple of decades after the Dead began to rise, is the zombie novel Robert A. Heinlein might have written. The emphasis is not so much on confrontations with shambling rotters—though there are some--but on the efforts of news blogger Georgia, her reckless brother Shaun, and their colleague Buffy, to cover the presidential campaign of one Senator Ryman. The very title, Feed, has more to do with journalists serving the needs of a constant news cycle in a world that has changed beyond recognition than with the ravenous imperative of the undead. It's about new media first, the effect the plague has had on society second, the necessity of putting a bullet in the brain a distant third.
It's inevitable that things go very wrong, and that Georgia finds herself covering the story of her career. As a reader, you'd be surprised if you didn't get something like that, eventually. But the shift in emphasis makes this a zombie novel like few others, a novel that earns its Heinlein resonances. The master would have been proud of what Mira Grant has done. Both masters, come to think of it...if you include George Romero as well.
—Adam-Troy Castro
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July 28 2010, 19:23:20 UTC 6 years ago
(Ick. Yes.)
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August 4 2010, 15:28:20 UTC 6 years ago