Ages ago – well all right, a matter of months – I picked up a book from the library. It was about a zombie apocalypse, and it was magnificently bad. It was the sort of thing I coined the term Apocalypturd for.
Honestly! We’re besotted with apocalypsii. Zombies, alien invasion, robots rebelling, nuclear war, global warming, ebola and friends… the list goes on. I sometimes wonder about that.
But I digress. To the book.
It is published by a specialty publisher, P-something Press (Piffle, probably) which delights in inflicting a plague of its own – ends of the world. I don’t know how they stay sane. Perhaps they just look at the money, or they’re ‘goth’ or ‘emo’, or both. But if they can afford the dead trees they’re evidently doing something right. After all, it seems at the moment, with history inexplicably veering away from the comforting business-as-usual future it was aiming at after giving up on the shiny silver future that was dead ahead in the 50s. And worse, we can’t figure out where the damn thing is headed, so it must be bad.
An apocalypse, I suppose, is when the actual march of history and our presumed march of history part ways. We’re not very quick on the uptake. Perhaps instead of a metaphor where we just ride the bus, history is the road and our fate is determined by who has the strongest grip on the wheel.
Oh, the book.
It starts off with the zombie plague virus or bacterium thing emerging in Africa. I suppose that’s a sop to reality; after all, the ebola family came from there. So to contain the mindless hordes, they blow up the bridges across the Suez Canal, or something. I don’t know if you read World War Z, but then again this is a different universe where zombies can’t roam the depths of the oceans, but get realistically crushed instead.
Obviously this would be a boring book if that succeeded.
So we switch over to the United States, where a Colonel Whatshername and newsreader Miss Forgettable meet, and then one leaks to the other the secret of the plague being zombies. (The gender of these two is important.) And here is where it gets ridiculous.
You see, they get abducted by the NSA, which are apparently a pack of suit-bound psychopaths who are allowed to do anything in the name of National Security, up to and including illegal imprisonment and torture. But we need baddies in a story, and zombies just aren’t mean enough. Yes, they’re deadly, remorseless killers, but they lack the self-awareness and intelligence to make their actions obviously vile. Besides, these days US readers seem to want to believe that their government is evil. I guess it’s something to do with that darkie they elected on the assumption that he would magically turn the US back into a paradise of –
Sorry. Lost track there again. Oh – and their victims being female makes their tortures all the more shocking. And melodramatic. Overwrought silent film music plays (in my head, not the book.)
Anyhow, cut to the escapees of the Sudan. They have problems, mostly to do with infected people carking it after a while and then the screamingly obvious happens. It turns out that one of the soldiers knows either the newsreader or the colonel. And then they return to Washington, where things are in an uproar, something to do with infected people having arrived by plane already, carking it, and away we go with the capital (Capitol?) in chaos and disarray.
Oh. One of the NSA goons turns out to have preserved a few drops of humanity after his training and suspected lobotomy and helps our two melodrama heroines out of their prison.
The soldiers come to a town and locate supplies and rescue uninfected, all under heavy zombie attack. It’s all very Boy’s Own macho stuff.
And here’s the thing. Everything feels disjointed, as though the two plots are only related by the direction they’re travelling. It’s like saying that since State Highways 1 and 2 run north to south, they must be close together. Or that since there are tramping tracks through the Tararua Ranges that allow you to go from one side to the other, then SH1 and SH2 are connected.
And then after all this they walk off into the sunset until the sequel. I could wait. The whole book felt like a threat of a sequel, unfinished, as though the author was trolling for advances.
The problem is that the whole damn thing felt like a pack of crypto-racist, unsubtly anti-government slogans. You can’t trust the government. We have to off the darkies to survive (which fails, please note.) Only self-reliance will save you, that and lots of guns and ammo.
But the zombie book obviously got me thinking in a roundabout fashion. It’s written in a time when people have noticed that the edifice known as American Power is tottering, but not quite falling over, and they then notice the zombie-like nature of their modern lives, and cry out for the damn thing to fall over and be done with it.
But here’s the rub. An apocalypse doesn’t mean the four horsemen, necessarily. It could well mean a radical change in how things work. Such as giving up some previously sacrosanct cultural fetish that was all well and good back then, but this is now and it’s not only not working, but it’s actually wrecking things. Which of course makes the old guard squeal but sorry, into the museum it goes.
Which is a kinder, gentler sort of apocalypse when you think about it. Maybe not as exciting as standing nobly on top of your condo blasting away at the mindless hordes but think of the money you’ll save on army surplus.
