Sometimes I get nostalgic for the past. Back in the days when men were men, women were women, and zombies were just shuffling dead things under the command of evil voodoo priests. Yep! Things were simple then. A voodoo priest would slip their victim some good old zombie potion, make sure the victim was buried with several spiders, and then dig up the result several days later, preferably hours after it screamed itself hoarse and turned its fingers to hamburger scratching at the lid of its coffin, buried deep under the ground. What could be more easy? Now things are all complicated.
In fact, today’s zombies are full-on politicized. In today’s world, it’s no longer sufficient to simply be a zombie. You have to crave brains, be a symbol of mindless consumerism, a walking pin-cushion for the human race, an unthinkable scientific experiment gone horribly out of control, a house and home for various social ills, an easy personification of moral decay, or maybe even the very end of the world as we know it. Horrifying death without malice. I don’t really know how zombies can take all this pressure. To tell you the truth, sometimes I think they don’t exactly wear it gracefully. Let’s talk about the zombies in this book:
- Zombies created by: New technology that reanimates the dead.
- Fast or Slow: Kind of slow and with bad memories.
- Killing zombies requires: Decapitation, maybe. Probably need to burn.
- Zombies are hungry for humans: Only when they “go feral”
- Zombies make more zombies: No
- The rest of the world: Basically went back to business as if nothing happened.
- Voodoo: No
- Lots of gore: Yep
I have to mention here that I thought Stefan Petrucha’s last book, Blood Prophecy (review here), was a great read.
In this book, a technology corporation came up with a way to restore animation (and probably soul) to dead bodies. The good news is that the zombies get something of their personalities and memories back from before they died. The bad news is that their memories are unreliable, their bodies are in bad shape and continue to degrade, and eventually the zombies “go feral.” This means that they degrade to the point where they start craving brains, or whatever. Our hero Hessius Mann is a zombie who was wrongly convicted and executed for murdering his wife. When the mistake was discovered by the state, Mann was revived. Seeing as how he was a policeman before he died, he became a private detective as a zombie.
Yes I said private detective. This means that the private detective genre (please refer to this article for a detailed description) gets mixed in here as well. So Mann is hired by a normie (a.k.a. liveblood) who wants to track down a zombie and things get much more messy after that. Multiple attempts are made on his life, he falls for a femme fatale, a rich gangster gets involved, and all the other tropes of the genre come into play.
The zombies in this book are politicized in that they are the untouchables of this dystopian futuristic society. As untouchables, they are rejected and marginalized by the normies in the book. The police not only look away while zombies are brutalized by gangs of bored hicks, but if one of the hicks gets hurt, the police join in against the zombies. Zombies aren’t tolerated in expensive neighborhoods, and etc. Sadly, the zombies are no longer capable of living normal lives and so they end up being powerless to avoid fulfilling their own stereotype. Actually, before you get even halfway through the book, the list of social ills portrayed really starts to weigh down the story.
So yeah, we have here a heavily-politicized zombie fiction pulp detective novel that takes place in a dystopian future. It’s like having a chocolate-flavored pumpkin pie served on a steak with hollandaise sauce. Maybe it’s going to be your thing, and maybe it isn’t. I ended up being reminded of Richard K. Morgan’s extremely annoying Th1rte3n. The good news is that this book kicks the shit out of Th1rte3n. For one thing, it has a sense of humor.
Creepy Factor: 1 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 3 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 1 out of 5 (leathery zombie stripper anyone?)
Funny and/or Strange Factor: 3 out of 5 (leathery zombie stripper anyone?)
Final result: There’s something about books where the main characters live under the boot of a dystopian society, and it’s something I might be tired of. This books has its up and downs. The ending, though, is amazingly suspenseful. If you like pulp detective fiction and zombies, this book may be exactly what you’re looking for.
Dead Mann Walking by Stefan Petrucha – ROC Books (a division of Penguin) – 2011
Thanks to the author for sending me a copy of this book to review. See you all next time!
(tragedy set in mythical surroundings), Tim Powers 
(historical hilarity and accretion of painful injuries), and James Branch Cabell’s 
and 
. These are both amazing books.
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