Just Finished Reading: Feed by Mira Grant (FP: 2010)

It was an Age of Miracles – the End of Cancer, the End of the Common Cold and the Age of the Zombie. Well, you can’t have everything, right? Naturally it was all with the best possible intentions. Two separate labs working on epoch changing medical advances in secret, the Internet rumour that the cold cure would only be for the rich and the eco-terrorists who released it into the atmosphere before any real testing had been done. When the first of the dead came back and started attacking people no one really believed it. That was the stuff of science-fiction and poorly made cheap horror flicks. Even the uploaded video didn’t really change much until it was almost too late. Before things got back under control almost a third of the world was lost although no one would ever know the full body count. Too much of the planet was simply too dangerous to go into and too dangerous to try to keep or take back – like Alaska. But a kind of equilibrium had been achieved. Sure there were still outbreaks – how could there not be when everyone was pre-infected with the zombie inducing virus – but they were getting really good at containing the damage now. After all, 26 years of zombie fighting experience has got to mean something. Even after that long zombies were still news though – thankfully for brother and sister Bloggers Shaun and Georgia Mason and their team of hackers and news hounds. The good news is that they’ve just scored their biggest gig ever – by being picked as the hottest new Presidential candidate’s official Blog team. The bad news, apart from all of the political BS they’re going to have to deal with, is that someone really doesn’t want the candidate to get the nomination and will do anything to stop it – including using zombies as weapons.

OK, first I have to say that zombies really aren’t my ‘thing’. I’ve never seen the attraction in either the shuffling, walking or running dead. I’m most definitely more of a vampire person. But there was just something about this book and this author that made me give it a chance. I’m definitely glad I did. This is definitely not a shuffle of the mill zombie novel For one thing it takes place 26 years AFTER the night of the living dead. The world building is really good and is one of the things that kept my turning pages. Everything has changed because of the zombie virus – from diet, to life style, to outdoor gatherings and sporting events, even to architecture – as, naturally it would. All of it is logical and, with the odd pinch of salt, makes sense in context. Most of the time the zombie apocalypse is just the background, the context, in which the narrative takes place. The focus is on the blog news team and what they discover during their time with the wannabe President and his opponents. The characters are well drawn – especially the sibling main characters – and their motivations are well grounded in the context of the world the author created for them. Everything, by and large, made sense. The only part of the narrative that I had problems with was the technology used – this is 2040 with no great or insurmountable discontinuity in technology yet the main news people were Bloggers – not even Vloggers – whose primary method of disseminating information was TEXT. They even had very sophisticated spy cameras etc everywhere and they even uploaded short video bites but primarily they uploaded blocks of TEXT. This seemed so at odds with everything else and at odds with 2020 never mind 2040 that it did break me out of the narrative more than once. However, significant though it was, this is the only real gripe I had with the book. It not exactly the first (or the last) work that dates much faster than anticipated. I did at one point, I won’t give too much away, decide that I wouldn’t be reading any more in this series when the author managed to kill off my favourite character but the satisfying (if somewhat predictable) ending made me want to know what happens next and how things play out afterwards – so you’ll definitely be hearing more from the author and from the Mason’s in future. Definitely recommended for all zombie fiction fans and even recommended for those who haven’t tried it yet. Naturally being zombie related there is a fair bit of gore involved – but not that much in the scheme of things!