For Want of a Brain: A Review of the Novel "Feed" by Mira Grant

Astute readers will recall I've been promising to review the Hunger Games trilogy as well as the feature film since April. But Feed has zombies in it and I've been reading it at the beach this past week (by "reading" I mean "alternating between it and three other books"). Also, Hunger Games has about a million images to choose from and Feed has very few, which means I can write this review and then watch to sun set over the Gulf of Mexico without having to worry about whether or not I've done service to Gale's immaculate biceps. Also, Feed has zombies in it. End of debate.

Now if Katniss shot zombies with her bow, then it'd be a different story. Specifically, she'd be a female Daryll from The Walking Dead. Imagine if she traveled back in time to the zombie apocalypse and met Daryll and they bonded over their love of archery and rural Appalachia. Then they had kids who would be super good at archery and would shoot all the walkers and... Excuse me, I have to go write this fanfic.

Feed takes place 25 years after the Great Zombie Outbreak of 2014 (although most of the story takes place in 2040, which is 26 years later, but there are more important things to discuss than conversational mathematics). The conceit (and double entendre) of Feed is that bloggers played a vital role is spreading word of the zombie apocalypse and were hailed as the real heroes of the zombie war (get it, like an RSS Feed and how zombies have an insatiable hunger for the flesh of the living). Three 22 year old bloggers are assigned to cover the presidential campaign of Senator John Ryman, but little do they know they are about to uncover a conspiracy that will shake the world as they know it.

Is that good? Have I done enough of the PR Spiel to actually talk about the book now? I hope that familiarized all my unfamiliar readers with the premise of the book. I know for a fact that I blew up at least two of my friends' phones with about 15 consecutive tweets about this book. And, in the interest of full disclosure, I only read 150 of the 400 pages and then consulted Wikipedia for the ending. I really wanted to get through the book before I wrote about it, but there was just so much to say. As the old saying goes, one does not have to eat the whole egg to know its rotten (and covered in zombie virus).

It's the Apocalypse, what could go wrong?

In a sentence, the problem with Feed is that it gets zombies, politics, and blogging wrong and that nothing that happens makes any sense and that the characters are all one dimensional & boring and that the whole world building exercise falls to pieces as soon as you think about it and that the entire universe the book is set in is more like Left Wing California Wish Fulfillment Apocalypse than anything based in reality. So you see, nothing too serious. The tragedy is that this is a super interesting time period that seldom gets talked about. Society isn't being destroyed but it's also not able to overpower the Undead Menace. If properly developed, this book could have like a Cold War style to it (albeit with more explosions and less diplomatic intrigue),

One of the problems inherent with any post-apocalyptic story is the ease with which you can punish people you personally find offensive. The best post-apocalyptic stories (such as The Road Warrior and A Boy and his Dog or Fallout 3 if you want me to cite video games) avoid this completely and generally paint the bad guys in broad strokes (usually to the tune of them being well intentioned people driven mad by power or by lack of power [e.g. the impotent underground people in A Boy and his Dog]) and that makes the hero more awesome because he/she doesn't succumb to that corruption. In bad post-apocalyptic films (think The Left Behind series), people are specifically targeted because of their beliefs. In Feed, the victims are picked because Mira Grant doesn't like them and it's done in a super obvious, illogical fashion.

The Zombies have more Brains than the Author

I'll start with the first example to book hits us with. Our three heroes are recording footage of zombies in the overrun town of Santa Cruz, California, getting footage of Shaun (get it? GET IT?! IS IT NOT AN OBVIOUS ENOUGH REFERENCE TO THE HIT ZOMBIE MOVIE "SHAUN OF THE DEAD"?) bothering zombies to upload to YouTube so their blog will get more hits. Because, obviously, after a global nightmare in which billions perished, people want to see adventurous types needlessly risking life and limb. There is no way this has already been done before in the 25 years zombies have been around. Santa Cruz was one of the first cities to fall to the zombies because it is densely populated and is a college town and is also in California, where gun ownership is marginalized and treated with suspicion (so, yeah, this makes perfect sense actually. Good job!). Well, in the course of pissing off zombies, a group of zombies is alerted and gets all up in our heroes' collective grills. In an escape that makes for a thrilling first ten minutes of a TV Pilot, the heroes barely escape the hordes of the undead and drive away to safety in Berkley, California. Which is also a densely populated college town. And has no natural barriers between it and Santa Cruz. So how is it safe again? Also, I wonder which branch of the University of California Mira Grant went to and which branch was her least favorite. I honestly have no way of inferring this knowledge from such a subtle and well thought out universe.



The excuse that Mira Grant gives is that UC Berkley is full of weirdos (true) so they would believe the dead were rising (possible) and would stockpile weapons (what?) and form an effective, organized resistance (because respect for authority is a HUGE part of UC Berkley's culture, as is a martial response to the unknown). Seriously, where would you get a stockpile of weapons at will in California? It's not like Texas where the average citizen has more heavy ordinance than the Cuban army. But I digress. I'm underlining the real concern here: why haven't the zombies marched (well, shambled if you want to be precise) on the nearby delicious city of Berkley? Strictly speaking, Berkley IS 80 miles away from Santa Cruz, but there are absolutely no natural barriers to make Berkley defensible. The threat of zombies is that the horde is like a great rotten tide, washing over everything in its wake and only getting stronger with time. So seriously, why would zombies stick around a dead place like Santa Cruz and not be following the dinner bell to Berkley?

I'm not misinterpreting things either. The book goes out of its way to mention that the zombies are concentrated in Santa Cruz and the rest of the highway & towns are clear. Why is that? The other reason given is that Santa Cruz is a Class 4 Infection zone and Berkley is a Class 8 Infection zone (less severe). This is bogus for two reasons: 1. It echoes the liberal dogma that not only is the Federal Government well organized, but it's capable of sorting the post-apocalypse into clear bureaucratic zones that are accurate (displaying a complete disregard for the Federal Government's track record in regards to organizing zones. See: Hurricane Katrina) 2. It believes the zombies will adhere to these zones for reasons that are never made abundantly clear. I guess the clean cities are protected by walls of paperwork, the zombie's only natural predator.

It's the Same Old Song and Dance (of the Dead)

But I'd like to take a second to talk about the complete lack of originality in this book. There will be major The Walking Dead spoilers, so if you haven't seen the second season finale, skip over the area labelled as spoiler. It'll be obvious. First, rather than the imprecise explanation for the zombie apocalypse (the best case being "When Hell is full the dead shall walk the Earth"), Grant goes for a meticulous explanation. The problem is her science ranges from wildly impractical to directly ripping off Will Smith's I Am Legend.

Even the part about dogs becoming zombified, except without the emotional impact.

Seriously, her explanation is that an airborne cure for the common cold merged with a cure for cancer and somehow created zombies. My medical school friend, Pimpmaster Doug, has informed me that spreading a cure airborne would be wildly impractical for a variety of reasons, mostly due to the fact that vaccines and cures aren't manufactured in bulk because they are slightly more complex than stereos and also that is horribly inefficient, unless you have access to the Shroud and this in Tunchanka in 2187 and you're Dr. Mordin Solus (another Mass Effect 3 reference! SCORE!!!). But the other unique thing is lifted from The Walking Dead ***SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER*** Grant straight up steals the idea that everyone is infected with the virus and as soon as you die, you become a zombie ***END SPOILER END SPOILER***

All the Characters are Zombies (because they have no soul)

Then there are the cases of more basic unoriginality and inconsistency. For starters, I've avoided naming the heroes until 1600 words into my blog because their names are horribly unoriginal: Shaun "of the Dead" Mason, Georgia "as in George Romero" Mason, and Georgette "Buffy" Meissonier (which is a Francophonic Mason). The explanation for all the George's is that Romero was declared a patron saint because his movies saved so many lives (because they are still super relevant in 2012) but that doesn't explain why she was so unoriginal with the names.

I honestly feel more emotion for the campaign button. Also, you're ripping off Watchmen now.

Then it comes to the actual characters the story revolves around. Uncharacteristically, Grant decides to focus on the Republican Primary, implying that there is an ineffective Democratic president in office. Hey, this might actually be different than what I expect. But then, Grant starts fleshing out her main candidates in the primary. One of them is a female Republican who is really dumb but got plastic surgery so she was able to gain a fan base and her name is Not Sarah Palin. Then there's the religious right demagogue who believes that zombies are God's punishment for our sins and that we need to be a more wholesome nation (so he is obviously the bad guy). His name is Not Mike Huckabee and I'm going to examine some of his "damning" policies and how they make no sense. Then there's Gary Sue, I mean Not Barack Obama, I mean Tom Ryman, who is the world's greatest politician and everyone loves him and he always says the right thing. The author describes him as "left of center", which begs the question as to why he's a Republican or would gain so much traction. He believes in God but only "when God comes down here and helps me clean my house, I'll be more than happy to help Him with cleaning His.", because Christianity is based around the idea that God operates Quid pro Quo and it requires no submission or effort on your part. The worst scandal that Georgia (the narrator) finds in his past is that his first daughter was conceived out of wedlock (which is no scandal at all for an atheist secular progressive; it'd be like telling a conservative he tried to join the Army at age 17). None of this campaign is believable for a second. Why bother using the Republican Party as a framing device if it is literally nothing like the current party? All it does is confuse the point!

High Schoolers Know Politics Better Than This

Then there's just the basic misunderstanding of how politics works. There's almost no discussion of the political issues at hand or why he's campaigning against the President (because Grant can only paint Republicans in a negative light), which makes up the day to day activities of the campaign. Instead, the focus is on how revolutionary it is that bloggers are allowed on the campaign trail... even though there were many bloggers on the 2008 campaigns and people generally ignore reports from people who are on the campaign's payroll. Oh by the way, I forgot to mention that bloggers are the new A-List celebrities because this is apocalypse literally fulfilled all of Mira Grant's wishes (which is another topic to bring up). But I digress. The worst example comes on Super Tuesday, which casual media fans know is the day that many states hold their primary. So, in accordance with the Byzantine laws of American politics, a politician who wins a plurality of the primaries that day has the upper hand the rest of the campaign and, with a successful Super Tuesday, can become a mortal lock for the party's nomination. On this day, Grant describes the heroes as going to "The Convention Center" and then learning that Ryman has a "23 percentage point lead on Super Tuesday" which is described as "Slim".

1. Yes, because there is a single primary called Super Tuesday and you can win it, because all the votes are put in one big pile, regardless of state. It's definitely not a series of separate elections which happen to fall on the same day.
2. 23 percentage point difference would be winning the race about 61.5% to 38.5% . For frame of reference, FDR's 1936 beatdown of Alf Landon was a 61% to 37% vote. FDR one the electoral college 523 to 8. My point is that this "slim" lead is one of the great beatdowns in American history.
3. Ryman ends up winning Super Tuesday with 70 percent of the vote (or maybe 70 percent of the delegates if you want to believe Mira Grant understands democracy) and pretty much secures the party nomination. But his rival, Evil Huckabee, is somehow still a candidate who should be interviewed in the weeks before the convention (which is usually 6 to 7 months after Super Tuesday). So how is his campaign solvent after 6 months of being constantly humiliated and defeated? Why would you waste money on an election you can't hope to win.

None of the Villain's Motives Make Any Sense

Unsurprisingly, the bad guy is religion because the heroes are atheists or agnostic (Ryman). Their one religious friend turns out to be a traitor working to unleash zombies for the religious side. There's a fictitious law called the Raskin-Watts law says that people who use zombies as a weapon can be tried as terrorist under the equally imaginary International Terrorism Acts of 2012 (confused yet?). Apparently, Raskin had a degree in Psychology from UC Santa Cruz (Boo! Hiss!) and Watts was a priest who wanted to bring people back to God. Somehow, this involves sicking zombies on people because zombies are God's punishment for our sins and I guess the priest was working under the assumption that people cannot repent their sins and the psychologist was just a sociopath? Their motives weren't entirely clear. What's the end game once everyone is zombies? Why do you think you can improve on God's retribution? If the zombies are God's will, wouldn't they have no need for mortal assistance? After all, when Angry God takes over, he generally tell the righteous to get out of dodge. He didn't tell Lot to help him round up the guilty in Sodom and Gomorrah and He didn't tell Noah to drown the world. But it's the typical ignorance and arrogance of an atheist exposed to the internet.

But this paragraph was the deal breaker. In a nutshell, he supports the death penalty, overturning Roe v Wade, allowing a looser interpretation of Mason's Law which allows families with creatures over 40 pounds (thus capable of reanimating on death) to live closer to population centers and encouraging a tighter interpretation of Raskin-Watts. She describes it as "Under his legislation, it wouldn't be a crime to own a cow in Albany, but it would be considered an act of terrorism to attempt to save the life of a heart attack victim before performing extensive blood tests". Wait, what?

I don't understand anything after the death penalty. As the much, much better book World War Z explains, the death penalty and long jail terms are a bad idea in the post-apocalypse because there are so few survivors and we need every hand on deck. Instead, crime and punishment becomes more shame based with stockades. In Feed, it's because what's the point of killing someone who will come back to life? Incidentally, Feed provides us with the answer: to perform experiments on the reanimated corpse; several prominent characters including George Romero give their zombie body to the government for experiments (so it's kinda stupid logic, but I can use better logic). But the contemporary political maelstrom that is Roe v Wade is obviously sacrosanct in the future because... there are food shortages? No, that's never mentioned and there are specialty restaurants, so widespread famine is unlikely. Because there are too many survivors? No, the main character says that 90% of people live in fear of zombies. Because Roe v Wade is a major part of the political doctrine for the Liberals in America and this book is basically an exercise in Liberal Wish Fulfillment? Yes, that sounds right. To its credit, World War Z sidesteps this entire maelstrom by never mentioning it. It's really not an issue that's relevant to the zombie apocalypse, except when it's brilliantly done like in The Walking Dead.

But I don't get the sentence in the book at all. It's a crime to own a cow in the city of Albany because a cow could reanimate and then hunt people very slowly and present a large and obvious target? And what would you do with a cow in Albany? Cow's need a lot of space and city's are famously short on that. A dog makes a lot more sense because they are small, fast, and have strong jaws (so getting bit would be super easy). But seriously? A cow is your go-to deadly animal? Give me a break. I honestly can't piece together the last part of that sentence."[I]t would be considered an act of terrorism to attempt to save the life of a heart attack victim before performing extensive blood tests" so that means it would be a violation of the imaginary Raskin-Watts law, which states it is illegal to use zombies as a bioweapon. But how is trying to resuscitate a heart attack victim using a zombie as a bioweapon and why would you need a blood test? It's not like CPR will give the zombie super strength when it wakes up. So how is CPR using a zombie as a bioweapon? And the blood test: it's well known that everyone who dies comes back as a zombie. So why do you need a blood test to remind you of this? Wouldn't it all be super obvious that if the person didn't die they wouldn't be a zombie? And wouldn't preventing someone from dying stop a random zombie from appearing and be the opposite of using zombies as a bioweapon? Did The Walking Dead video game also just feature a similar dilemma but do it with significantly more emotional impact and not relying on calling someone a terrorist? I consider myself to be an above average intellect and I honestly cannot follow this train of logic. There are ways to make this argument make sense and not change anything. Let me demonstrate off the top of my head: "It would be legal to own a German Shepard in an apartment hall, but it'd be an act of terrorism to take your ailing Grandpa to the hospital." See, that underscores the threat of undead animals and the innocent acts that could be interpreted as terrorism (since Grandpa would reanimate if he died in transit).

This Whole Story is Riddled with Wish Fulfillment and Inconsistencies

This paragraph is a long time coming, but I've already shattered the record for the longest EMPH post. I'll handle this another day when I haven't had to spend two hours typing about how literally every aspect of this book is wrong and doesn't make sense.