Feed me

This is the best book series on the planet. As a former journalist and lifelong horror afficianado, strong enough words do not exist to convey how much I love this series, or how strongly I feel that if you have not read it, you should just drop everything, right now - stop reading this post, run, not walk, to your local Barnes and Noble and buy it. All of it. Right now. And read it. Or, if, like me, you're more the immediate gratification type, you can download it from iTunes. There are a couple of neat extras too, that McGuire has done. But we won't bother with that now. Just read the series, and come back and talk to me when you do.

To be clear, we're talking about the so-called 'Newsflesh' series, which starts with the book Feed and continues through Deadline and Blackout, all by Mira Grant. Mira Grant isn't really Mira Grant though, but a pseudonym for Seanan McGuire. I'm more than a little starstruck by McGuire, who is roughly my age, but who has managed to produce a prolific output of quality novels under both her own name and the Grant pseudonym, as well as contribute to a variety of filk albums. And, what is personally cool to me - she knows an old friend of mine from college/the SCA. That's the part that makes me squee a little bit, that she's a fellow SCAdian, and a friend of a friend, not just, dare I say, one of the greatest authors living today.

I know that's an extreme statement for a body of work that is (gasp!) genre - that is to say, about something - unquestionably telling a fictional story, something that appears to be frowned upon in literary circles. At the very least, it appears to cut you out of the immediate running for serious consideration by say, the list of this month's best works in Vanity Fair, or a number of literary prizes. And if you write fantasy and horror, it makes your English Composition professor send back your paper with a lot of silly criticism, as if the mere act of telling a story rather than writing a veiled confessional is somehow suspect. But to tell a story, one that couldn't happen now, circumstances being what they are, and make the reader believe that, given the right circumstances, it could, and that, furthermore, its telling reveals fundamental things about our own society, and about human nature, and moves you, as a reader, makes you care whether these people, who have ceased to become characters, but are people, friends even, whether these fully fleshed people live or die - that's when you've done something right. That makes you great. McGuire is great. Or Grant. Whichever she prefers.

Feed is a zombie tale, in the vein of 28 Days Later - fast, virus-ridden zombies. She takes time with her science - of course, I'm a former lit major, not a scientist, but as an armchair scientist, her theories sounded entirely plausible. In the bad future, where all good tales these days take place, two scientists perfect two cures, one for cancer, and one for the common cold, and through a series of events I won't go into, infect the entire human population. Or, inoculate them, if you will. The cures work by introducing viruses into the body that attack the cancer/cold. Unfortunately, when they combine, they also turn you into a zombie. Not all the time, because just as viruses work in the real world, the mere fact of having a virus present in your body does not make you symptomatic all the time. Think HIV. But like HIV, when the viral load of Grant's Kellis-Amberlee virus reaches a critical mass in your system and overcomes your natural defenses, you become sick. In this case, you amplify - i.e. become a zombie. So...zombie virus is unleashed...fast-forward 20 years. What happens to the world after that?

That was the most amazing aspect of the series. So often, the initial event of a story is where the story starts and ends. But life isn't like that. Events have repercussions. The interesting bit of a story isn't the action - not that there isn't action in this book. There is, and plenty of it. It's going to be a hell of a movie. I think of Dollhouse, at the end, when all the shit was going down. And, in the case of the third book, of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Which hopefully isn't too much of a spoiler. It probably isn't, unless you're a giant nerd, like me. But when was the last time a monster novel dealt with, not just the science, but the political implications? The social implications? Ooh, and did I mention the zombie bears?

It's good. You'll like it. Trust me.