Flesh Eaters

The scariest thing about Joe McKinney's zombie book may be the root cause of the affliction: three successive category 5 hurricanes rip through Houston, flooding it and altering the coastline of Texas to make the city a coastal town, which it is not now. McKinney is clearly not one of those who consider global warming a hoax. Maybe if those who do think so knew that it could cause the zombie apocalypse, they'd change their minds.

The book centers around a Houston policewoman, Eleanor Norton, and her commander, Mark Shaw. They try to keep things stable in the wake of the storm, as Shaw opens the University of Houston campus to refugees. But they get all confined without food or proper sanitation, and soon survivors are walking around in stilted gaits, shuffling and moaning and eating people.

McKinney has given his zombies a scientific rationale--necrosis filovirus, which is a real disease, something like hemorrhagic fever, which leaves the victims with vacant stares, impervious to pain, and hungry for flesh (although he doesn't explain one of my bugaboos about zombies--why don't they eat each other?). They are not true zombies, in that they are not the reanimated dead--they are alive, and can be killed, though not easily.

The zombies pass along the disease by bite, so soon the whole city is over run. Shaw and his sons have decided to rob a bank, which is underwater, and get out of Dodge. But getting out of the city is not easy, and Norton and her family and Shaw and his sons have to battle the zombies where ever they go. McKinney paints a nasty picture of the afflicted--with cracked, black teeth, drooling blood, and occasional body pieces missing.

The writing is solid if not flowery, with some banal platitudes about courage. The reading grade-level is not high. There's also a tendency to go meta with the prose, referring to a lot of pop culture, especially other zombie movies: "In her mind, zombies were nothing but harlequins, clowns in shabby makeup. They staggered around, pantomiming death, while cheesy music played on the soundtrack and bare-breasted bimbos titillated the teenage boys in the audience. From her youth she remembered the movie version of Max Brooks's World War Z and the TV series based on Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead, and she remembered those grossing her out, but never scaring her. They were ridiculous. They were slow and stupid and little more than an excuse for a whole generation of angry-minded, disaffected youth to safely and sanely fantasize about killing loads of people. Zombies were wish fulfilment, nothing more."

So we have here a decent horror story, a page-turner with some genuine frights, that also has a social conscious. That makes it worth reading for horror fans. This novel also won the 2012 Bram Stoker Award for Best Horror Novel.