Review: Deadline, Newsflesh, Book 2 (Review by DeadVida)

Review: Deadline (Newsflesh, Book 2)

By Mira Grant

Orbit Press

ISBN: 9780316081061

SPOILER ALERT – If you haven’t read Feed (Newsflesh, Book 1), stop! Go read Feed now…

Done? Good.

Taking your narrator and killing her is damned risky. Mira Grant did this in Feed, leaving her readers to wonder how she would approach the telling of the next book in the Newsflesh trilogy, Deadline. The answer is much better than the television standby of having her twin show up. Instead, Grant made the narrator’s brother, Shaun, “a crazy person” who is able to talk to his dead sister, George. This could have been trite, but Grant managed to pull it off. In a sense there are two concurrent narrators, but this is more Shaun’s story.

Where Feed was more a political zombie thriller, Deadline is a medical zombie thriller. A researcher with the CDC, first introduced in Feed, arrives at the After the End Times media compound in Oakland. Within minutes there is an outbreak and half of the city is blown-up. Shaun and what is now left of his crew escape, taking the CDC researcher with them. As the initial stages of a global conspiracy are revealed, Shaun shakes off the grief that has been paralyzing him and begins seeking revenge for his sister’s death. As a blogger and reporter he does this the only way he knows how – by exposing the truth.

The series is set a generation after the initial outbreak, so existence is highly controlled. Everyone is paranoid, tested and tracked, because everyone is infected with the Kellis-Amberlee virus. Some even have secondary reservoir conditions, with concentrations of the virus infecting specific systems. It is these reservoir conditions and some statistical improbabilities that begin uncovering the larger conspiracy first revealed in Feed.

Grant manages to describe a large amount of technical and medical information without losing lay readers. She blends the actual, with the probable and improbable in such a way that the reader is left guessing what is truth or fiction.

At 608 pages this is actually a compulsive read. The worst part in the book is the cliffhanger ending and knowledge that I will have to wait a year to find out what happens to Shaun and the rest of the After the End Times crew in the final book, Deadline. On the bright side, Orbit has begun releasing short stories related to the universe Mira Grant has created.  Highly recommended!

For the true fan check out http://www.thefeedbook.com and the novella, Countdown, http://www.orbitshortfiction.com/2011/08/countdown-a-newsflesh-novella.

Review: Rebirth, by Sophie Littlefield (review by DeadVida)

Rebirth

By Sophie Littlefield

Books set in post-apocalyptic worlds tend not to offer shreds of hope. In fact, that seems to be something of an antithesis in modern zombie lit. The characters are often as lifeless as the doomed planet. The world Sophie Littlefield created in Aftertime, and now revisits in Rebirth and Survivors, a short story bridge between the two books, is a bit different. Instead, she gives us a compelling protagonist, Cass Dollar, who effectively shows the parallels between the once dead landscape and the once deadened woman, both of whom struggle for renewal.

Littlefield’s earth was destroyed by bio-warfare attacks. Cass suffered at her step-father’s hands and then her own. Yet we see each fighting toward life – be it a sprig breaking ground again or the broken pieces in Cass fighting against her innate self-destruction.

Survivors, a short story, details the arrival and integration of Feo, a young orphan, into the encampment run by Dor and introduced in Rebirth. It was made available pre-pub as a free ebook and is available now from the publisher or ebook vendors.

Rebirth picks up a few months after Aftertime. Cass, Smoke, and Ruthie, Cass’s young daughter, have finally settled into a family life. Cass’s fragile sense of trust is broken when Smoke volunteers for a revenge mission. As a reaction to Smoke’s abandonment, Cass volunteers for a mission of her own to rescue Sammi, Dor’s daughter. Cass uses her immunity to the plant responsible for creating the zombies, or Beaters as they are called here, to gain entrance to the compound holding Sammi. In Littlefield’s world, the only thing more dangerous than zombies is fellow survivors.

Things I love about this series:

• The end of days was geo-political and came about because of plant-based bio-terrorism. The US faced famine and the government created a genetically modified plant, kaysev, which is nutrient-rich and can grow wild. Beaters are not the walking dead, but people affected by a variant of the plant. This is a clever and original take. In a sense, the “zombies” are secondary to whatever happened in the world that led to the famine, but in this new world this all seems like ancient history.

•  Theory and rumors are accepted and people just get on with living in hard times. I enjoy that there is a construct of backstory that is never entirely explained. The viewpoints of the characters matter over the omniscience of the narration.

• The survivor groups are varied and fluid. The main encampment is more a shanty town, rather than the usual claustrophobic clusterfuck of stereotyped survivors in a fortified compound.

• The main character, Cass Dollar, is a woman and mother. Cass is weak and strong at the same time. She fights a three-front war against Beaters, malicious survivors, and herself. She constantly makes questionable decisions, but Littlefield does a good job showing the character’s faulty logic without diminishing or over-explaining her.

• Rebirth manages the delicate balance of real character development, a believable universe, action sequences, and genuinely creepy scenes (instead of easy gore).

I’m already looking forward to the next book and want to find out what's next for Cass and her companions as they continue to attempt to survive, adapt and recover from life Before and in the Aftertime.

New Rigor Mortis Art Gallery

After we finished Rigor Mortis #4, we realized how little of the art was online. We decided to create an art gallery for Rigor Mortis. Often there are extra pieces that are not used or are modified for the layout. We've decided to include those here as well. We’ve also decided to include art that was deemed to scandalous to include in the print edition. While photocopy has been our medium of choice, there is degradation of the artwork. Please take a look and see for yourself what a true master of the cross-hatch can create with a little ink, Bristol board, and fear for his life.

Review of Rigor Mortis from BuyZombie.com

We received a review from Paul Skow with Buy Zombie that made our day.

"There is an obnoxiously empty hole when it comes to zombie magazines, and RIGOR MORTIS unknowingly fills that space. RIGOR MORTIS is, in my opinion, all things a zine should be: original, clever, creative, personal, cheaply priced, funny, and smart. In my fairly limited experience with zines – I could count the number I’ve read on both hands – it seems that RIGOR MORTIS sets the bar pretty high. From the original artwork, to the in-depth reviews, to the obvious love of the genre, it seems to ooze quality....

Bojan’s original art really does elevate RIGOR MORTIS into a nearly untouchable zine. From collages of Nazi zombies, to Nosferatu, to gore-filled intestine eating, Bojan is a perfect match for the three writers...

You can obviously see my unadulterated praise for this publication, and I give it 10 out of 10 nervous breakdowns."

http://www.buyzombie.com/2011/06/28/reviews-of-zombie-related-things/rigor-mortis-magazine-review/

And, Paul, just so you know, we are working on that long-winded thing. You should see the raw drafts!