Zombies!
So, I don’t have much luck with zombies. Stephen King’s Cell was pretty good, and Max Brooks’s zombie books are golden, but everything else is…..well, not worth talking about.
Two things prompted me to give this one a go: I will always give zombies a go, because I always want those stories to be good (even though they rarely are), and Mira Grant is the pseudonym of Seanan McGuire, a fairly well-liked author in these parts whom I’ve never read.
But I came away with fairly mixed feelings about the book, and am not sure whether to continue reading the series (of which there are at least two more).
The novel takes place in 2040, and follows two bloggers, the brother and sister team of Shaun and Georgia Mason, as they latch on to a rising presidential candidate. Much of the novel details the political career and aspirations of this candidate and it just….did absolutely nothing for me. This book was the equivalent of the second season of The Newsroom where the guy from that horror movie left his job as a news producer to be on the campaign trail because the girl he liked didn’t want to be with him. God, that show fell off a cliff. While recognizing the faults in the season one, I legitimately loved the show, and had a great deal of affection for its characters. Jeff Daniels is always great, and Emily Mortimer was charming. I love Sorkin’s writing – even if he can be sanctimonious and patronizing. But the show never lived up to that rant clip that went viral after the premier.
Where was I? Oh yeah. Zombies.
I think a third of this book simply didn’t have zombies. Grant seems to have lost the thread, and spent so much time building the political and virological (is that a word? I don’t think it is. But I’m leaving it.) world for this book that she forgets to actually put zombies in it. Instead, we get long sections about journalistic ethics, how the virus takes over its hosts, the political background of the various Republican presidential candidates, and Zzzzzzzzz……….
I will give the book this much credit, though – Gov. Tate in the book is a pretty good Donald Trump surrogate. And, in my mind, Senator Ryman (the “rising presidential candidate”) was just Bernie Sanders – despite the 30 year age difference, and that Ryman probably looks more like Mitt Romney than Bernie Sanders.
In that regard, the book captures the current political climate pretty ably.
But the book is just okay. Too much political talk, too few zombies, and the climate reminded me too much of the current American apocalypse.