A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Cell phones send out a signal that makes everyone who hears it turn into ravening zombies!

Stephen King often starts out with "ordinary thing X is scary" and then takes that premise in interesting directions. So it didn't put me off that the premise of Cell is "cell phones are scary," because he's done great things with "a car is scary," "a Saint Bernard is scary," "a devoted fan is scary," etc.

The problem with Cell isn't that cell phones aren't scary, or that the book is basically "old man yells at cell phones." It's that though there are individual good scenes and good characters, the premise goes in nonsensical directions, the characters are subpar, and the book as a whole doesn't work.

The opening scene, in which the one guy in a park without a cell phone watches helplessly while everyone who answers or makes a phone call goes berserk, is a grabber. But it also ends up illustrating why King normally doesn't do big action scenes as openers. Everyone's running around attacking each other or trying to escape, and we know nothing about any of them, so it's exciting but in a hollow way. In most King books there'd be more buildup - sometimes a LOT more buildup - so you care about the characters and are biting your nails in anticipation of the phone zombies, rather than the phone zombies attacking on page one.

The no-phone guy is Clay, a comic book artist/writer who's in New York to pitch his comic, while his estranged wife and beloved son are home in Maine. Normally I either love King's protagonists or find them awful but compelling. Very unusually for King, I didn't care about Clay.

There's a lack of specific details on what his wife and son are like as people, so Clay's quest to find them lacks emotion. He also just doesn't have much personality. Clay hooks up with a gay guy, Tom, and a teenage girl, Alice, to avoid phone zombies and find his family. I did like Tom and Alice, but the entire book is from Clay's POV. This book particularly would have benefited from multiple POVs as everything outside of Clay seemed more interesting than Clay.

But mostly I want to rant a bit about how the phone zombie plot is aggressively nonsensical.

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Really bottom-tier King. I rank it with Thinner and The Tommyknockers in my absolute least favorites. (I have not read Dreamcatcher.) If you like King in general, which are your least favorites of his?

Check out the covers. The first is the original, showing a flip-top phone. (Also an overturned cup and a scary shadow, both of which detract from rather than add to the central image. The artist definitely caught the "throw in things randomly" vibe of the book.) The second one shows a modern phone. If you read this book picturing a modern cell phone, you will be very confused as they are only ever used for phone calls, not accessing the internet.

I HATE zombies. And body horror creeps me out. And child-in-danger stories are usually annoying and manipulative. So I can’t believe I am actually recommending a child-in-danger zombie novel that is chock-full of disturbing body horror… but this one is really good.

It opens with a heartbreakingly charming narration by Melanie, a bright little girl who adores her teacher, who secretly slips her a book of Greek myths. Melanie loves the story of Pandora, the girl with all the gifts. But she doesn’t understand why her beloved teacher often seems so sad, or why she and the other kids have to be tied to chairs to attend school. Why is almost immediately clear to readers – it’s after the zombie apocalypse, and she’s the rare intelligent zombie that scientists are experimenting on in the hope of finding a vaccine or cure – but there are many other mysteries that are less obvious.

The first section and denouement of the novel are the best parts; the first because of Melanie’s narration, the last because it’s an absolutely perfect climax, satisfying on the all levels. In between is a more standard but well-done zombie novel. In particular, the mechanism of the zombie apocalypse is pleasingly clever and well-worked out. But the beginning and the end really make the book.

Right from the start, Melanie is explicitly compared to Pandora, so it's clear that in some way, she will unleash horrors upon humanity, but also hope. And all through the book, she does, in ways that change as she changes, learning more about the world and herself. It's beautifully done.

There’s another emotional state beyond fear that horror can evoke, which is something akin to Aristotle’s idea of catharsis. It’s horror as transcendence, where terror and horror are also beautiful and awe-inspiring. C. L. Moore’s stories “Black God’s Kiss” and “Shambleau” are like that, too: creepy and disturbing, but also seductive and full of sense of wonder.

The Girl With All the Gifts hits that mark, off and on, until coming to a conclusion that’s viscerally horrifying but also beautiful and transcendent. The characters other than Melanie are sketched in, plausible types rather than three-dimensional characters, and a late reveal about the teacher’s past is reductionist rather than revelatory. But the beginning is brilliant, the middle is solid, and the ending is haunting in the very best way.

The Girl With All the Gifts

An ambitious high fantasy, complete in one volume, which is one-third a cool story about a magical apocalypse narrated by a prince who gets cast into a city of zombies, one-third an irritating tale of political intrigue, narrated by the prince’s fiancée, in which virtually everyone involved is a total imbecile, and one-third a mostly dull account of religious fanaticism brightened by the fact that the priest who narrates is, by far, the smartest person in the book. Not that that’s saying much.

Once people were randomly hit by the Shoad, which transformed them into glowing mages with amazing powers. They would then move to Elantris, a wonderful glowing magic city. But ten years before the story begins, for no reason anyone knew, the Reod hit: a magical apocalypse which made the Elantrians become hideous zombies, physically dead but still sentient, suffering agonies of unending hunger and pain but unable to die. Elantris instantly rotted away, and though the Shoad continues, it now turns people into sentient zombies who are flung into Elantris, where they are locked in, not given any food, and are not allowed contact with the outside world. There are, however steps up the outside wall, which people regularly climb to gawk at the zombies.

Why no one ever tosses food down to their hungry loved ones is but one of the many, many, many, stupidities of this book. There’s also the sadly common stupidity in which people don’t tell each other why they’re doing what they’re doing, or who they are, and so forth, for no convincing reason. (This is especially aggravating because doing so not only would have made sense, but probably would have made the story more interesting, not less.) The king secretly hides the prince in the zombie city, figuring no one will recognize him, and tells everyone he died. This works only because the prince doesn’t tell anyone who he is for no reason that makes any sense, even when the king stupidly lets the fiancée princess into the city to distribute food.

There are the several scenes in which the princess plots against the king and discusses the stupidity of the king, IN COURT WHILE THE KING IS PRESENT, and gets away with it because she whispers and no one is bright enough to notice or eavesdrop. She eventually makes the king commit suicide by marching into his chambers and saying, “You suck and I’m going to tell everyone.” I pictured the scene in Airplane where the guy hangs himself rather than listen to his seatmate for one more second.

There are many, many moments in which someone thinks of or tries a rather obvious solution to a problem that has been ongoing for ten years, and are the very first person to do so. (My absolute favorite was that in ten years of slimy, starving existence in zombie city, it apparently never occurred to anyone to scrub off the slime or grow their own food until the prince suggested it.) The aura of Mary Sue, which floats about the main characters like their pet balls of light, isn’t helped by the unintentionally hilarious scene in which the princess tells one of the prince’s buddies that the prince sounds too perfect to be true, and the buddy responds, “No way! He has many flaws. For instance, he doesn’t care at all about money. All he’s interested in is making people happy. He even loses card games intentionally to make me happy!” The repeated references to the spunky princess as "liberated" didn't help either.

The solution to the mystery of the magical catastrophe is conceptually cool, but depends on no one having ever, either at the time of the catastrophe or in the intervening ten years, applied basic deductive reasoning to a set of clearly relevant facts which were widely known at the time of the apocalypse.

And then there are the terrible made-up words. The magic apocalypse is the Reod and a major city is called Teod, leading to several sentences like “Things haven’t been the same in Teod since the Reod.” Depressed zombies are Hoed, which I kept misreading as Hosed, which they certainly are. Talking balls of light are called Seons. A person named Shaor is afflicted by the Shoad. It’s like there was a vowel-sound shortage, along with a tax on syllables.

Also, this sentence is probably not supposed to be funny: The common people served the arteths and dorven, the arteths and dorven served the gradors, the gradors served the ragnats, the ragnats served the gyorns, the gyorns served Wyrn, and Wyrn served Jaddeth. Only the gragdets – leaders of the monasteries – weren’t directly in line.

Here’s what made me finish this book, and keeps me from labeling it “awesomely bad”: for all its ridiculous elements, the plotline about the prince in the zombie city is genuinely compelling storytelling – I really wanted to know what he’d do, why the apocalypse happened, and how he was going to undo it. The less-fanatical-than-meets-the-eye priest would have been a good character in a better storyline, but spends two-thirds of the book spouting exposition about gragdets, odivs, hrodens, and other ridiculous religious titles.

Has anyone read his other books? Are they better?

Elantris

In Mary's world, there are simple truths.
The Sisterhood always knows best.
The Guardians will protect and serve.
The Unconsecrated will never relent.
And you must always mind the fence that surrounds the village....

The enormously misleading cover copy for this YA novel makes it sound like a certain stinker of an M. Night Shyamalan film, in which tons of portentous build-up lead to the totally unsurprising shock ending reveal that There Are No Monsters Outside The Village. Actually, there are monsters outside the village. Zombies! Tons of ‘em! They first appear on page two, so this is not a spoiler.

Mary lives in a post-apocalyptic fenced village surrounded by "the Unconsecrated." Unlike anyone else in her village, she longs for some other life, which to her is symbolized by the ocean she saw once in a faded photograph. A mysterious religious organization called the Sisterhood calls the shots in this otherwise sexist society. Needless to say, the Sisterhood is keeping (very predictable) secrets.

When Mary’s mother is bitten and becomes an Unconsecrated, her brother Jed blames Mary, and local boy Henry doesn’t propose, Mary is forced to become a Sister. She is soon entangled in a complicated love quadrangle between her best friend and the two brothers who both love Mary, and is too curious for her own good about the possibility of life outside.

The first chapter is gorgeously evocative, there’s a number of arresting images and set-piece scenes, and the whole book is a gripping read. Ryan pays a lot of attention to imagery patterns and thematic linkages, such as between real and symbolic zombies, and this is generally done well. Mary’s desperate desire for Henry’s brother Travis is vividly written even though Travis is a non-entity.

But except for Mary, the characterization is barely even two-dimensional. Several significant characters have about one recognizable trait each. This is a big flaw in a zombie story, as we ought to care when people are munched by zombies. It also made the central character relationships fall completely flat. The culture of the village is barely indicated, but what little we see of it seems to be small-town every-America that’s far more generic than any real town. I’m assuming the Sisters are Christian, but we never get any details about their religion. All this adds to an overall sense of blandness.

Additionally, several crucial explanations about what’s going on make no sense at all. (A prisoner who could be killed without penalty or released at some risk is instead deliberately transformed into a crazed killing machine and then released to see what will happen. That never goes wrong!) And when the story takes a new direction half-way through, it is way too coincidental that the characters who end up with Mary are, with one exception, the only ones she already cared about.

I read The Forest of Hands and Teeth thinking that it was better-suited to film. (I wasn’t the only one who thought so: a film adaptation will appear in 2011.) A good movie would make excellent use of the zombies and zombie action scenes, and could flesh out the skimpy characterization with vibrant performances. Though I wouldn’t re-read the book, I’d see the movie.

Still, the writing is accomplished and the ideas are ambitious enough that I'd definitely read Ryan's next book, even though I didn't think this one was completely successful.

View on Amazon: The Forest of Hands and Teeth

This is the sort of story where one can quite honestly write, "I forgot to mention that Heaven and Hell collided some volumes back."

It also features this exchange, which I believe can be appreciated out of context, and is probably the only time in the entire series when I liked Rosiel:

Sandalphon (creepy): Once I have my own body... I will devour you! I'll devour you all!

Rosiel (deadpan): Well, I'll look forward to that, Sandalphon.

( You think that lump of flesh clinging to life in that tub is my true form?! )

I finished this series a while ago, but was unable to write it up because every time I attempted a thoughtful, coherent analysis, the content I was trying to analyze was so deliciously demented, so carefully foreshadowed yet totally insane, that my head exploded.

So I will not analyze. Perhaps someone else can analyze in comments. I will merely provide a highlight reel. And, in case this persuades others to persevere beyond the awful and incoherent first volume, this is the kind of series where it's not all that spoilery to mention that a fleet of flying cannibal zombie angel embryos is sent out to destroy the universe. Also, the art is jaw-droppingly beautiful, especially on the covers.

( Setsuna escapes on the back of a flying whale. )