The Hunger Games: A 150th Post Extravaganza

That's right! I'm delaying talking about Fantasy Football to finally talk about the Hunger Games! I have no idea how I'm going to broach the subject, but I'll do this the EMPH way: with very little forethought and a great deal of digressions with the illusion of order!

I'm partial to this logo. It's simple, classy and has meaning to the story.

What I Think of the Series as a Whole

I'll start this off with a bold statement: I think The Hunger Games is significantly better than Harry Potter. For starters, Katniss never uses a time machine to solve all her problems and then never mention it again. Secondly, The Hunger Games brilliantly use Latin and classical history and Harry Potter has all the subtlety of a freight train with Latin. Seriously, the main evil family is led by Lucius Malfoy (translated: Satan McBadguy, because Lucius is one step away from Lucifer) and his eldest son, Draco Malfoy (translated: Satan McBadguy Jr., because Draco means dragon and dragons historically are the very incarnation of the Devil). I will talk more about Latin later, because this is really one of the highlights of the book. But back on point, I think The Hunger Games is substantially more relatable than Harry Potter and its story is much more focused and relies less on deus ex machina to resolve the plot. For starters, Katniss's unhappy starting place is a lot more believable and a lot more sad than Harry's. Her family lives in poverty and was pushed to the brink of starvation due to the untimely death of her father in a mining accident, which forces her to assume more responsibility than a teen girl should. Harry's sad place is an evil wizard killed his parents before he ever met them and now he must live with his comically abusive aunt and uncle where they force him to live under the staircase instead of one of the extra rooms they have, because they are jerks and Child Services doesn't exist in this universe and literally no one has ever asked Harry about his well-being. Then one day, Hagrid shows up and tells Harry that he's a wizard and also he's the wizard of destiny and also his parents left him a fortune in wizard gold but lacked the foresight to convert any of their money into wealth their son could use OR consider leaving him in the care of someone who wasn't estranged from the family. Whereas Katniss has to overcome her obstacles by playing things smart and surviving, at least until thefirst half of Mockingjay, Harry overcomes his obstacles through things he had no control over. Boy, it sure is fortunate that it turns out that Harry's very touch kills Voldemort and that Voldemort forgot about this. One good avada cadavra spell from Quirrell and it's a 1 volume story. It's also a good thing that Dumbledore's phoenix can apparently find its way into long hidden and forgotten chambers so that Harry can literally pull a magic sword from a hat. I could do this all day, but I won't.

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.

Review: World War Z

Finally, a book that combines my love of military drama with zombies.

A few years back, I heard that Mel Brooks' son, Max Brooks, had written a comedy book called The Zombie Survival Guide. As a fan of both comedy and zombies, I was intrigued by the possibility of a zomedy. It would require delicate balance to keep the melancholy of the zombie apocalypse from ruining all the jokes. While the zomedy would reach perfection in Zombieland, it shambled out of the box with The Zombie Survival Guide. The book couldn't decide whether it wanted to be a parody and a joke or if it wanted to provide legitimate zombie fighting advice and tell horror stories of zombie attacks of the past. The comedy bits were very bland and predictable, but his horror stories were incredible. Zombie attacks of the past had a ton of very interesting alternative takes on history. My favorite will always be in the Lost Colony of Roanoake, which was overrun by zombies. However, the book's inconsistent tone kept it from being a favorite of mine. When I heard that Brooks was returning to the zombie genre to tell a serious story, I was excited.

No one wants to see Will Smith fix utilities for two hours.

World War Z is presented as a series of interviews conducted by a UN Investigator to record the causes, events, and aftermath of the zombie epidemic. Right from the start, Brooks earns major credits by being one of the very few zombie authors to have humanity come back from the zombie apocalypse. For obvious reasons, most writers (and especially video games) prefer to stick you in the middle of the zombie apocalypse where all the action and destroyed cities are, preferring to leave the whole rebuilding of mankind to your imagination. More importantly, Brooks has a very realistic feel for how the zombie epidemic could spread across the world so quickly, how various countries would react to the zombie apocalypse, and how humanity could fight back against the zombies. 90 percent of the time, his thoughts are brilliant and combine a strong understanding of global politics with practical zombie fighting. For example, the zombie plague starts in China, a country with a very large, very dense population where the government controls the press and firearms are restricted.

The book is broken into 8 chapters, consisting of multiple interviews from people of importance from around the world. Sometimes they are leaders, intelligence officers, doctors or soldiers, but just as often, they are regular people thrust into uniquely brutal situations. The sheer number of names can be overwhelming, but they aren't particularly important. One of my favorite things is the amount of stories which intersect without the other people knowing about it. So you hear about an event you know the intimate details of in passing from the story of another character. It does wonders to add cohesiveness to the universe.

There's only one problem with World War Z and it's that Max Brooks' political opinions constantly seep into the book. Some things are inherent to the genre. For example, if the CIA was super good at containing zombie outbreaks, then we wouldn't get very far in our zombie apocalypse and there wouldn't be too much drama.. However, it's the times when he's not taking potshots that are the worst. At every opportunity, conservative values, people and places are vilified and liberal values, people and places are sanctified. For example, the military can't recruit the manpower to fight the undead hordes because people were war weary from Iraq. The northern states fare much better than the southern states because they have winters that freeze the zombies over (ignoring that the South has a shotgun per capita of nearly 1.17). The lifelong capitalist embraces the benefits of Keynesian economics (although this one is more forgivable, since rationing is more essential in a zombie apocalypse). The Sun Belt refugees don't pack warmly enough for the Canadian winter and are generally idiots when it comes to keeping warm. Because no one camps in the South and the winters are never cold. The most egregious line that stands out in my mind was "My father never hit my mother. He was a progressive." Because only people with traditional values beat their wives, right? A liberal would never be capable of violence!

METS: My Entire Team Sucks

There is one other thing that bothers me in the book, but it's fairly minor. In an otherwise fantastic chapter, a pilot who crashed deep in zombie country is talking over the radio to a woman by the call sign Mets Fan. As it turns out SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER the woman is either a guardian angel or maybe the pilot's subconscious SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER and that the name may have been influenced because the pilot's mother was from the Bronx. The problem is the Yankees play in the Bronx, the Mets play in Queens. How could an error like that get through publishing?! To the uninitiated fly honeys reading this who may not understand why it's a big deal to mix up the Yankees and Mets, it would be like mixing up Edward and Jacob in Twilight (if Edward had won more World Series than other franchise and was universally hated by all other people and Jacob was the laughing stock of the land who desperately tried to keep up with Edward but couldn't even keep Jose Reyes from signing a long term deal with the Miami Marlins! SUCK IT JACOB! I mean, METS!). Simply put, people in the Yankees neighborhood aren't going to be Mets fans and would be insulted to be lumped together. It's a mistake that becomes obvious with the slightest amount of research and would be so easy to correct in future editions of the book.

World War Z is a fantastic read, even for people who aren't obsessed about the zombie apocalypse like I am. While there are a handful of errors and political biases, it's never enough to break up the story's wonderful pacing.  The story provides a unique global perspective on the zombie apocalypse as well as the rare glimpse of the world after the zombie threat is contained. I strongly recommend reading the book and give it Four and a Half English Muffins out of Five.

Note to self: design English Muffin ratings. Maybe the half muffin will be like, half eaten or something. I don't know. It'd look cool though, right?