Post-Turkeypocalypse

Ambling sloth-like through the wasteland, breathing in a noxious haze of tryptophan and sickly sweet liquor, I plod past the pestilent pond of porcelain piled high in endless pillars, towards the puddles of putrid fat liquidized and pooling on the plates, once poured steaming over broken bones now dripping down the drain while the last vestiges of flesh hang threadbare off that osseous matter. Small hands have left their mark behind them, stained and sliding down the wall as if grasping for some invisible rungs to rescue them from wrath. Meanwhile, that gelatinous glob of congealed red mass continues to vellicate on the floor, a ceaseless tremor that suggests its sentience. Yet somehow, the empty glass and glasses have survived the slaughter mostly intact, only weathered and worn by overuse though now dirty, discarded and disheveled down among the grateful undead whose virile corpses litter the living room furniture until such time tomorrow that consumption might continue.

"The Girl With All The Gifts": A YA Zombie Book That Will Actually Make You Cry

I read the first 30 pages of The Girl With All The Gifts on the train ride into work one rainy morning, and I'm pretty sure I got choked at least three times in that opening section of the book. Who the hell gets emotional over precocious 10-year-old zombies?

The Girl With All the Gifts is a new novel by M.R. "Totally Not Mike Carey" Carey. I've been a fan of M.R.'s alter ego for a while now, ever since his run on X-Men: Legacy and, more recently, his crazy Harry Potter metafiction series The Unwritten, so even if The Girl With All The Gifts wasn't one of the most-hyped genre books of the year, I would have still been pretty excited about it. However, it was heavily hyped, which made me that much more anxious to get my hands on an ARC — and I can happily say that it was worth every bit of the buzz.

The simplest way to describe The Girl With All The Gifts is as a young adult zombie novel, but even given my personal penchant for clunky noun-y elevator pitches, that description doesn't do the book justice. The story focuses on an eerily precocious young girl named Melanie, who lives in a cellblock with twenty other children like her, where they go to school and learn and then get forced back into their cells by soldiers. Once a week, the children are given a chemical shower and a meal of grubs. The kids seem a little weird, sure, but they're all remarkably articulate, if a little bit naïve and — oh yeah, they sometimes crave human flesh, like the other mindless "hungries" that have obliterated the British landscape.

Here's a trailer for the book:

The majority of the book focuses on the relationship between Melanie and her favorite teacher, Ms. Justineau, on whom she has one of those weird psuedo-crushes that plenty of ten-year-olds have but especially those who are already emotionally stunted by, erm, crazy fungal parasites. That's another thing — this psuedoscience surrounding the zombie outbreak in this book is some of the most well-researched and believable science I've ever read in a zombie story (not to mention, viscerally grotesque in way too many ways). If you want some spoilers, it's a very slight extrapolation from this very real bit of scientific horror.

The real strengths of the book lie in its characters, as well as M.R. Carey's delicate prose. Sure, there are a few places where I would have liked a bit more vivid descriptions than "bland army cellblock" and "post-apocalyptic countryside," but Carey is able to capture so much emotion in his stark and simple sentences. The relationships are complex, but they're rendered in such a way that they are easy to understand and empathize with. And honestly, the young-adult-as-intelligent-zombie metaphor is a particularly powerful one — the adults simultaneously underestimate her and also think she's dangerous, while she has trouble grasping the true complexities of the world around her. Young adult stories are often about coming into one's own and discovering one's true identity, and in the case of Melanie, that couldn't be more literal. She thinks, therefore she is, but she continues to struggle with understanding what that means for the other people around her — both human and hungry alike. The rest of the cast stray into two-dimensional territory — the gruff soldier, the alcoholic Irish rookie (oof), the viciously determined scientist, and the mothering, emotional researcher — but in the end, you can't help but feel for them and root for their journeys, as well as Melanie's (and, like all good drama, those journeys don't always work in harmony together...).

If you like zombie stories, or young adult stories, or post-apocalyptic stories, or teacher-student relationship stories, I absolutely cannot recommend this book more highly. So check it out — I swear, it doesn't bite...

Me Am Do Talk Good

I found this fun little link on Twitter the other day: a quiz that proclaims to be able to guess which English dialect you speak, along with your native language. I like to think I have a pretty solid grasp on the English language, in all its bizarre permutations (except for verb tenses of "lay"; I will never get those right), but the results, as they say on the internet, shocked me.

Most of the questions are either "Which picture best portrays this sentence" or "Which of these sentences is correct?", and as I went through it the first time, I was pretty liberal and considerate with my answers. A few of the questions allowed for more than one answer, so I selected more than one — considering some of the sentence structures that were not immediately instinctual for me to use, or were not my personal preference for grammatical comfort, but where nonetheless "right," or at least, not explicitly incorrect. Also a lot of it was in passive voice, which was mostly just frustrating, because whatever dialect I do speak, it certainly isn't passive voice.

The results? Apparently I speak with a "US Black Vernacular / Ebonics" dialect, and my native language is Portugese.

Hrm. Okay. Well that was not what I was expecting, especially having grownup in the famously "accent-less"* (according to us, and no one else) state of Connecticut. I know that I sometimes slip into Hiberno-English (especially when I've been drinking), and that my love of hard-boiled fiction narratives sometimes seeps into my otherwise cheery demeanor (I could be talking about how much I love ice cream on a sunny day, but I occasionally imagine myself doing it while standing in a dark alley wearing a trenchcoat to hide my face and smoking a cigarette, with a flask of whiskey hidden in my breast pocket).

So I took the quiz again, this time being less forgiving in my answers, and as predicted, I speak in a "US Standard English" dialect, with "American" as my native language. OKAY SO FINE I'M PREDICTABLE AND I WAS JUST BEING DIFFICULT BEFORE. Either way, it's a fun little quiz to take (if you can ignore the poor writing), so check it out when you have a chance.

*And yes, I know that this should be "dialect," not "accent" — right? Or should it? Okay, so maybe I don't know, but I think it's supposed to be dialect but most of us say accent anyway. THE POINT IS, I've been told that the indicator of a Connecticut dialect is a softening of "t"s in the middle of words, so that they sound like "d"s instead. You know, like the way we say "Conedikit."

A Retrospective Look at Jane Austen's Brain-eating Habits

Can you believe it's been 5 years since the release of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies?  And just over 200 from the release of the original novel? Well, to celebrate, the folks at Quirk Books (who published ...and Zombies and its followups, as well as many other fine collections of pulped trees) asked me to do some digging and explore the past, present, and future of their massive mashup mega-hit -- where it started, how it worked, and what it did for the company over the last 5 years. The short answer is that it basically launched their entire fiction line, which is now tremendously successful -- and also served as an accidental omen to our current pop-culture status of zombie overload (seriously! They beat the trend! But barely). For the long answer? Check out my 3-piece retrospective on Pride & Prejudice & Zombies on the Quirk website.

REVIEW: The Shambling Guide to New York City by Mur Lafferty

This was enjoyable, but it took me longer to get through than it should have, because I didn't care enough. It's a fun concept, I like the world, but I wish it had either been funnier, or darker (for example, and this is a slight spoiler: if you have a co-worker who's a succubus and feeds on sexual energy, and he tries to seduce your character at a nightclub because he's hungry, and you DON'T find a way to make that a metaphor either for date rape, or a regrettable but consensual one night stand with a co-worker? C'mon! It's right there!). Instead, it was kind of a mediocre middle ground between monsters and tourism that was certainly fun, but nothing remarkable. I loved the idea of Public Works, and the zombies, and some of the characters were still fun (despite the fact that I have literally no idea what the protagonist looked like). By the time the epic ending came around, which I guess was kind of cool, I was more interested in finishing the book than I was in what actually happened to any of the characters (spoilers: they all live happily ever after. lame).

My rating: 2.5 of 5 stars

View all my reviews

The Shambling Guide to New York City (The Shambling Guides) on Amazon

Holiday Special

Today on Five By Five Hundred, I decided to kick off our celebration and excitement for the upcoming holiday season. No, not Christmas; I mean the end of the world! With only 12 days left until the supposed Mayan Apocalypse / World Shift / New Age / Another Boring Saturday Where Nothing Significant Actually Happens Or Changes, I decided to tweak one of your perennial holiday favorites and update it for the times. Enjoy!

"The 12 Days Of Apocalypse" on FiveByFiveHundred.com

ALSO! In case you don't already follow the rest of the daily exploits on 5x500 without me telling you (for some bizarre reason I don't know why you wouldn't), we are currently taking submissions for a new weekly contributor to join us on Sundays! Follow link to learn all about the necessary submission information in handy haiku form. All we ask is that you post a new something every Sunday in keeping with the theme of the website. "What's the theme of the website?" you ask, like some fool who hasn't even been paying attention. "Glad you asked!" I respond through gritted teeth. I pause for a moment as I hiss in my breath and explain that the only criteria is that must write something and that it must be under 500 words. Poetry, prose, scripts, rants, memoirs, serial fiction, serial murders -- whatever, it doesn't matter, just as long as it's under 500 words. Simple enough, right?

If you think you have what it takes, check out our submission guidelines. We look forward to hearing from you!

An America / Universe / 12 Colonies / Other Fictional World That We Can Believe In

Judging by Facebook feed, we are now officially in the throes of Election Season. Which is kind of like mating season for most animals, but with more blood, and more assholes. And so to lighten to the mood (read: FURTHER contribute to the orgy of political posts that are currently consuming all of your various news outlets and social feeds), I've compiled a list for Tor Dot Com of my preferred third party options in the 2012 Presidential Election. This whole two-party system is whack, anyway; when do I get to vote for the Jedi Council?

"Ten Great Alternative (Fictional) Political Leaders" on Tor Dot Com

BONUS: This is the single greatest speech ever written in cinematic history. Oh man. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l31UUl5SyXk]

Haiku Beer Review: The Third!

Continuing in my established tradition from the Mass Brewer's Fest and last year's Winter Beer Jubilee, I present for you the latest installment of Haiku Beer Review, compiled at the 2012 Winter Beer Summit. I make tasting notes into my phone as the night goes on, so that I can turn them into haikus when I get home (and eventually sober up). I know, I know, I'm a genius, it's true. Anyway, enjoy! (Also, thanks to Dig Boston for the free tickets and for putting up with my whining. #thomdunnwantsbeer)

"Haiku Beer Review #3: Winter Beer Summit 2012" on FiveByFiveHundred.com

Night of the Living Undead Turkey

Drinking! Family! Revelry! Tryptophan! All the things that make Thanksgiving such a wonderful holiday! But then — what comes after? The barren wasteland full of angry zombies, near-comatose after having gorged on too much flesh and blood. So basically, after dinner time, Thanksgiving becomes kind of a post-apocalyptic landscape, the kind you see in Zombie films or Mad Max. You can figure out where this is going, can't you?

"Post-Turkeypocalypse" at FiveByFiveHundred.com

Braaaaaaaaaaaiins!

This week's flash fiction shines a light on a frequently persecuted minority group, and shares a tragic but all-too-common tale from their perspective, a point of view that's seldom heard. Because hey, zombies have feelings, too.

First Person Shooter at FiveByFiveHundred.com