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.
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| 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.
