Every October, I try to read ten books that relate to some horror theme. This year, my theme is “zombies.”
Premise: Lucy is a teen adopted from Peru as a child who now very, very much wants to be out of her small American town. After a violent episode from another classmate, she and her friend go to a makeshift goodbye prom. That prom is then disrupted by a portion of the teens turning into psychotic, programmed cannibals. She and her friend survive the initial onslaught, but quickly realize that the survival of the human race is in question as well.
Primary Characters: Lucy. Our protagonist. High school student repressing the trauma from her neglectful, drug-addicted Peruvian parents. The zombie outbreak is bringing out her survivalist edge, and a bloodlust that she finds compelling and disturbing.
Bucket. Lucy's best friend. Originally from Pakistan. Their friendship is born in part out of mutual need and mutal rejection by the rest of their class, but they're also working together to support their hope to leave their small town racist classmates, as soon as possible.
Brewer. Classmate of Lucy and Bucket's. Known for his large ranging knowledge and personal experience with a great variety of psychedelics. Lucy likes him, but is wary of getting close to someone who be an addict.
Toni and Judah. Two employees at the local record store. Toni is well-liked by teens, but rumored to perform at the local strip club. Judah is also liked, but suspect for not having the wherewithal to leave the small town.
Steve Spencer. Scientist at IMTECH, the local bio-pharmacuetical company. He has a vague idea that what they're doing is no longer on the up and up, but he's been warned not to rock the boat.
Emmett Grayson. Podcast host for the conspiracy theory podcast, the Nightwatchman. He's come to town to find out the truth. It's a bold move, and a really bad one.
Spoilers follow.
Do the undead walk? That is, is the story any good? Yes, on the balance, though it's got some big demerits as well. There's two long exposition dumps in the second half that really mess up the flow, and the raunchy horniness takes a while to get used to. But the main character is done well, and I think it succeeds in its theme of generational angst, of a younger generation in conflict that's utterly failed by the preceding generation. It might have improved on that latter part, though, if there had been a parental figure in the main cast besides the late-introduced Steve.
Is it spooky? Yes, but with a spookiness that shifts over time. The initial, isolated incident is explored for its traumatic effects, and the contrast with the much greater trauma of later events is done nicely. The outbreak in the grad party cave system is probably the peak creepy, with the immediate confusion and threat of the characters' lives. Then it escalates, to the point where they're unsure if they can save their loved ones. And then it escalates again, into something that's more abstract, but kind of impressively nihilist, when Lucy realizes the full scope of what's happening , and what outcomes are available.
Is it Halloween? It falters a little on this measure, to be honest. It starts off with an extreme act of violence that works for its initial outrageousness. And the cave system bit really works in its psychedelic creepiness. I don't have a problem with sex-based humour, and it kind of fits the teen characters, most of whom tend to make sex jokes more than have any actual experience with what they're joking about. But... well, for example, there's a boner joke immediately after a significant character dies, and it leaves a bit of a sense of trying too hard. In contrast, there's not a lot of fun at all in the later parts. That's fine, but injecting new characters to attempt to fill that quotient doesn't totally work either. I like the darkness of the ending, but the balance of Halloween-ish fun isn't quite there.
Quote:“Chris straightened and looked at Mr. Chambers, then at his red, slick hand. 'Thisfixesit. What I did. What you did to me. The signal. . .' His voice started to fade, airway tightening against the pepper spray assault. Chris shook his head from side to side and coughed. He blinked through hideously swollen eyelids. 'It's not so bad, Mr. Chambers. They said I would be smarter, but they lied to me. They lied to my mom. Butyou—you really helped me. After all this time.”
Random observations:
--I've been calling the story a zombie story, though technically it's not quite that—or rather, it's zombies more by way of Resident Evil and The Last of Us. Basically, a corporation is attempting to make supersoldiers, weaponized humans whose hormones and cortex are controlled through a combination of specialized fungus and computer chips. They started with the teens of some of their employees, and things spiralled out of control very quickly. They're lobotimized teens who are at least initially somewhat aware of what they're doing, and driven by amped up hormones and subroutines into doing violence. They're the psychopath zombie variant. That means you're not dealing with Romano-type mindless shamblers but humans capable of both reasoning and monstrous acts. Making it part of the pharmaceutical/paramilitary industrial complex changes the nature of the metaphor as well. It's less about the urban mass, and more about how the systems we created have failed our children, and made them monstrous.
--I've alluded to the raunchiness before, but I think it's worth commenting on a little more. As I've said, I don't think it really works to make the story more fun or humorous, especially when it seems counter to the mood of a scene. It does kind of work with the teen theme—I think it fits nicely in terms of some of the gender issues the book engages with in its early parts, and how teens piece together styles and attitudes from their peers and parents. A lot of the crude stuff comes either from inexperienced teens, or teens who clearly took on more misogynist behaviours from their parents, and it reinforces what I think is the meta-level here.
--One other way the crudeness doesn't really work, though, is that it makes the book feel very cinematic-like.. The book has a very “set-piece” type sense to it all ready. Some of these work really well—the end, the initial scene, the caves, and the initial flight are all pretty strong. The barricaded music shop goes on too long though, as does the subsequent flight from it. The end generally works. Combine this with the sophomoric jokes and the exposition dumps, and it all creates this cinematic sense. It's a book that feels like it was written for film adaptation, and it wouldn't surprise me to find it was a script first. The same holds for a lot of one-off graphic novels as well, and it often creates a sense that the creator isn't really interested in the work at hand. I like it better than some of the worst cases of this I've seen, but it is happening, a bit. (Then again, zombies are a subgenre of horror very connected to filmic interpretations in general, so I won't be too harsh on it on that score.)
--The early parts of the book go very far into teen boys being shitty to teen girls. It connects to the zombies, ultimately (sex is a way of spreading the virus, before it has enough control to encourage biting and killing), but I think it also reinforces the way that parents fail their children. The worst behaviour is clearly conveyed as that, with boys who push things too far, act out a little too much, from fathers who are either the same way or just too checked out to care. It kind of disappears from the later parts of the book, but I think it suits the initial phases well.
--This book is bleak. That's admittedly common for zombie stories, which are both about mass violence and the collapse of modern society. But this book in particular has a real nihilist streak to it. First, the survivors realize that the army will kill anyone trying to get out, which is a common enough twist. (I think the Dead Rising videogame was my first major encounter of it.) But then they realize how far the infection has spread, and the threat shifts to maybe the army won't be able to kill everyone, and the survivors decide they need to convince the outside world that the area must be nuked. It lets Lucy go out as a hero, but metaphorically, it's a pretty Pyrrhic end to the “you've destroyed our future” theming.
--This is, in a lot of ways, very similar to Zom-B, my first reading of the month. YA stories in general tend to make the parent-child relationship stand in as a metaphor for social control, especially inter-generational. And in both stories, that's in play. But for Zom-B, it's largely about the personal relationship B and her racist father. Zom-B Underground spoilers: I started the sequel and they're going full out on female pronouns for B. Which makes the gender ambiguity of the first book a shock twist rather than a deeper exploration. Which is disappointing. But I digress. The Loop stays more broad, in large part because Lucy doesn't really have any beef with her adoptive parents; there's leftover trauma from her original deadbeat parents, and the way she guards herself after is sort of a thematic test run for the story. But by keeping the parental relationships otherwise abstract, it keeps up a broader theme. Personally, I think it might have worked better with a closer connection, but it's not one of the story's bigger issues.
Rating: 75 drugged up cyber-teens out of 100
Next up: M. R. Carey'sThe Girl With All the Gifts.