After some time of not reading fiction, I saw {{Mira Grant}}’s {{Feed}} recently in a store, checked my local library, and reserved a copy.
Now I need to read {{Deadline}} and {{Blackout}}. Grant’s writing, while typically female in style (first person dialog – both inner and outer, and the main character is a girl), does not confine its audience to needing to be female to fully enjoy it. I’ve read (or tried to read) many female-authored stories that are intensely difficult for me to really get into because it’s largely internal dialog in the female protagonist’s mind. I’m not a girl, and what ramblings are conveyed don’t jive with my brain 🙂
Exceptions to the rule have only come from {{Stephanie Meyer}} ({{The Host}}), {{Suzanne Collins}} ({{The Hunger Games}} trilogy), and one other that I purchased in Britain several years ago but whose name escapes me.
Back to {{Feed}}. Our heroes are an adopted brother and sister, Georgia and Shaun, and their tech friend Buffy. They’re all bloggers with licenses to travel into contaminated areas (ie, where zombies are freely roaming), but all blog differently – Georgia is a Newsie, Shaun is an Irwin, and Buffy a Fictional – so they report the news in an objective fashion as possible; educate by “poking things with a stick”; and write poems, stories, etc based on their type of blogging.
After a short introduction to our main crew, the backdrop of being selected to blog Senator Ryman’s presidential campaign in the substantially-post-zombified world of 2040 (the Rising happened in 2014) is the main setting.
Interestingly, Grant uses references to other pop culture zombie portrayals (including ample nods to {{George A Romero}} who more-or-less created the ‘ideal’ zombie world we all love today with his groundbreaking work in {{Night of the Living Dead}}, {{Dawn of the Dead}}, {{Day of the Dead}}, {{Land of the Dead}}, and {{Diary of the Dead}}, and which is also typified in AMC’s TV production of {{The Walking Dead}} (also a graphic novel series)). This is unlike perhaps any other horror/scifi writer I have ever seen before: she uses those stories to exemplify both “what we got right”, and “what we got wrong” in her universe.
If you’re queasy at the thought of flesh-eating zombies roaming the world, don’t read {{Feed}}. (Also don’t read {{World War Z}} – another of my favorites). If, however, you love a good whodunit, and are intrigued by the backdrop of a man-made-but-survivable apocalypse, go read {{Feed}}.
I’ll tell you how the rest of the trilogy is after I’ve finished them.
I like Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series (all the books incorporate a number in the title, such as “One for the Money”). There’s not a lot of logic to a lot of things, but the absurdity for pretty much everyone and every thing is a huge part of what makes the series so fun.