So this morning I woke up, picked up my new book, Brains: A Zombie Memoir, and started reading while waiting for the insurance adjuster to arrive. The adjuster arrived around page 150 and since the book's only about 180 pages long, I finished it off before heading in to work today.
It won't be winning any literature awards, and it's clearly an attempt to cash in on the zombie craze that's going around, but it was still a pretty clever take on zombies. The basic premise is this: the zombie outbreak has hit, and our main character is pretty quickly turned into a zombie.
Only he realizes he still has the capacity for higher thinking. He's managed, somehow, to keep his intelligence and his ability to write (the book is his memoir). This doesn't prevent him from craving brains - he consumes quite a few people throughout the course of the book - but it does let him think about what it means to be a zombie, and whether there are other 'thinking' zombies like him.
He does, of course, find some. From a zombie who was a nurse in life and has taken to patching up zombie corpses so they'll last longer, to a kid zombie whose motor functions don't seem to be degrading and can still run. Speech seems beyond them, but they put together some hand signals and start working on the zombie revolution. The humans are winning the war against the undead, after all.
The group of zombies, some thinking and some not but kept around for other reasons, start heading to Chicago where they hope to meet the doctor who created the zombie virus. Meet their maker, as it were.
The book is told in a black-humor style and keeps action happening at a good pace. There are a few surprises in it, but by and large it's pretty easy to see where the story is going. The characters are all surprising vivid for zombies, each one with its own personality that follows through to their actions, though all of them have the overpowering urge for brains.
Its this last piece that's talked about the most. The craving for brains, wrestling humanity with canabilism, and the journey that the main character goes through as he's trying to figure out just where zombies fit in God's plan, or in scientific evolution, for that matter.
Overall, if you're not a fan of zombies, this book's not going to turn you into one. It's a popcorn book meant to entertain and it does a good job of that. I'd recommend it to people who want a quick, brainless read (get it!), and to people who already enjoy the zombie genre.
Sounds interesting, I will check it out.
ReplyDeleteBut on a related subject, I have had Josh Coulten's song "All I want to do is Eat your brains" stuck in my head since Sunday (you can find it on episode 10 of Gamers Lounge). Over the course of singing the song to myself (over and over) I realized that in all the zombie movies, books, cartoons, etc that I have seen... never have I seen a zombie actually crack open a human head and eat the brains in side.
Sure lots of people have been eaten and turned to zombies, but it has been their flesh that has been eaten and not their brains.
So where does the notion that zombie are after brains come from?
They're just eating the flesh in order to get the the creamy nougat brain matter inside! Modern society cannot handle the consumption of brains, so they just show the foreplay of flesh-eating.
ReplyDeleteI'll bring the book by next time I see you. It's a pretty quick read; you should have it done in no time.