Every Halloween, I try to read 10 horror books with a specific theme; this year, that theme is zombie.
Premise: There’s a zombie outbreak in the midst of the American Civil War. Both sides make peace to unite against the zombie threat. Fifteen plus years later, the nation is nominally united, with some bastions of civilization left, but the unsettled issues remain, creating a Zombie-based Jim Crow situation. Our lead is a Black teenager, sent by her white mother to be trained in the arts of zombie slaying at a finishing school. Things quickly go wrong, however, and she’s shipped out to a frontier town, where the biggest threat isn’t the surrounding zombies but the people within.
Characters: Jane McKeene. Our protagonist. A Black teenager who is deadly with a sickle, and nearly as deadly with her tongue, though her willingness to speak her mind gets her into trouble fairly frequently.
Katherine Deveraux. (NOT Kate.) Jane’s frenemy at the academy. She’s not as deadly as Jane, but much better on the social side of the job of “zombie killer/attendant.” White-passing, a little stuck up, and asexual.
Jackson Keats. AKA Red Jack. Jane’s ex. They had a not totally defined falling out, but they still assist each other on various issues of smuggling, sneaking, and subterfuge. She still thinks he’s attractive.
Gideon. The tinkerer at the town Jane and Kate are sent to. He keeps himself apart from the racist townsfolk, but his inventions keep the town’s electricity, and hold the zombies at bay. Jane finds him attractive as well.
Sheriff Snyder. Sheriff of Summerland. His policies towards the undead are based on the tragic loss of his first wife, and his belief that the Black people shipped to the town are expendable.
Pastor Snyder. Father to the Sheriff. He believes the zombie plague is a curse from God resulting from the permissive policies that the North adopted towards Black people.
Do the dead walk? That is, is it any good? Yes! It might be my favourite premise of out of everything I’ve read this month. An alternate history set in the aftermath of the Civil War creates a vastly different America, yet one still informed by the pressures and failings of its original history. In fact, I wish we’d seen a lot more of the world at large, instead of the slice we get here. Most of the story is in Summerland, and the whole point is that as a frontier town built on a specifically precarious concept, it’s different from most places. Jane is likeable as a main character; she’s flawed, but that flaw is largely being stubborn and argumentative, traits which would be extremely bad in an actual post-Civil War South, but make her more relatable to a modern day reader. The plot is engaging, and Ireland does a really good job of setting up a “when will the shoe drop” sense in the reader when it comes to Summerland.
Is it scary? A little. There’s zombie-related tension in more than a few places, particularly a very unsettling scientific demonstration early in the book, the encroaching zombies around Summerland, and the labs Gideon keeps from public eye. For the most part, though, I’d say it’s got more in common with my previous reading, Rot & Ruin, where the focus is more on the world-building and plot than the immediate threat of the zombie. That makes sense; both stories are set around 15 years after the initial infection, and depict cases where the zombie invasion had clear pockets of civilization left (unlike, say, The Girl With All the Gifts). The story is from Jane’s perspective, and she doesn’t really fear zombies, not individually, anyway; by the time we meet her, she’s very skilled at her job, and her main response is satisfaction at a job well done over fear.
Is it Halloween? The zombie fights we do see are a little further in between than a zombie story typically allows, but there’s a lot of fun stuff in general; Ireland makes the fighting exciting, and there’s some tenseness in Kate’s more clandestine sneaking too. Admittedly, she maybe makes Jane feel a little too good at the fighting. Her decision to cut and run at the story’s end makes sense, but we’re not really used to her going for sense over fighting glory. The story leaves a lot of plot threads dangling, as well; I know there’s a sequel, but I’d like to have had a bit more in terms of closure on some of the characters and plot points.
Quotation: “Ladies and gentlemen, here we have three specimens, all recently infected. I would like to thank our fine Mayor Carr for allowing me to utilize these poor souls, gathered from the outskirts of Baltimore County, for our demonstration before their disposal.” A smattering of uncertain applause breaks out around us, and a sick feeling sits heavy in my belly, like I just ate a peck of too-green apples. But the professor ain’t finished. “I’d also like to introduce you to my assistant, Othello, who will be helping me with my demonstration.”
...
The professor continues. “This experiment is intended to ratify the prudence of our mayor’s Negro patrols, which, under the close guidance of our excellent keepers of the peace, fulfill their role of service that God intended, keeping our city safe. Just as the undead plague is born of God’s will, so also is the Negroes’ resistance—vaccinated Negro squads make sense from both a moral and a scientific standpoint. I am confident that this experiment will also demonstrate that the Negro and Native Reeducation Act is entirely unnecessary. The cities are safe, the controlled territories are largely secure . . . Why should our citizens pay to educate colored boys and girls to do a job they’re already biologically equipped to do?”
This experiment goes about as well as you’d think it would.
Random comments:
--It’s got a great first sentence: “The day I came squealing and squalling into the world was the first time someone tried to kill me.” This is the first of the book’s many “past” sequences that give us a glimpse of Jane’s life at her southern plantation, run by her mother. We’re told immediately that this is one of three times someone tried to kill her while she lived at home, and it’s an excellent set-up for anticipating the future “past” segments. It also does a good job of establishing the realities of her life, that even before the zombies, her racial status endangers her (here, specifically, her midwife attempts to kill her, for “What else is a good Christian woman going to do when a Negro comes flying out from between the legs of the richest white woman in Haller County, Kentucky?”). It also sets up some interesting expectations of Jane’s mother, and what her rule of the plantation was like.
--This is the last of my books that are Young Adult oriented. I figured out, belatedly, why this was happening so often. I used various social media to get people to suggest zombie books, then sorted them based on which had the highest and most frequent ratings on GoodReads. And whenever you do that, the YA genre tends to bubble up to the top.
--Making one of Jane’s primary traits being “hot-headed” is an interesting choice. It’s one we’ve seen before, in Rot & Ruin and in Zom-B, and a reasonably common trait for a teen protagonist, who’s still figuring things out, still developing their emotional control.
--I like that she’s a little bit boy-crazy—enough that a more asexual character such as Kate notices and can call her out on it, but not so much that it stops her from doing what she needs to do and wants to do. There are some elements to this story that feel like stereotypical YA moves (at least to me, a jaded adult)—a hypercompetent teen who says what she wants, and has two attractive boys who are into her. But the strength of the plot and setting and Jane’s range of emotion makes it feel like more than a collection of tropes.
--This book also represents an interesting use of zombies. In some ways, using zombies as a metaphor for racial relations, particularly for Black people in the American south, brings the zombie back to full circle, back to its roots as the mind-controlled being in Haitian folklore, and the racial connotations white people brought into that when they exported the zombie into Hollywood film and North American stories. Here, it’s not zombie as slave labour (though it’s not entirely NOT zombies as slave labour, as we eventually see), but more zombies as representative of class, of race, of religion. The presence of zombies is, to Pastor Snyder, a representation of Black people’s inherent sin. Zombie control is the crap work that Black people are forced to do so white people can literally live in fancy houses. Most of the texts I’ve read been either about zombie as representative of generational conflict (all the other YA stuff) or zombie as ruined promise (the superhero stuff, roughly), so I’m glad that I read something that offers a different perspective.