Passing Strange

Passing Strange, by Daniel Waters, is the third in a series (see my reviews of Kiss of Life and Generation Dead), and I thought it would offer a conclusion to several ongoing mysteries, but instead it leaves readers with questions that have been unanswered for the duration of all three books, which is the point at which I begin to lose patience with a series (will there be a fourth book? My reading of the author's blog and the blog "written by" zombies from the series does not reveal that mystery, either). On the other hand, Passing Strange is a good enough story that I read it in one sitting and finished it the same day I bought it.

The main character of this book, Karen, is "passing" as a live person even though she's really a zombie, much as light-skinned African-Americans could sometimes "pass" in the early decades of the twentieth century. In an entirely predictable plot development, she was in the closet about her sexuality while alive and is just beginning to come out of it in her "undeath." She's also "passing" among the zombies as one of them while worrying that they might also hate her because she is "coming alive" by being able to heal from bullet and knife wounds.

Discrimination against the "undead" continues unabated, with details about various characters to bring the feeling home to readers, like when Karen is questioned by the FBI and her father learns about it afterwards:
"You spoke to federal agents without us even getting a phone call?" he said, really spun up.
"Dad," I said, "they aren't required to tell you anything. We're dead. We're not citizens. In the eyes of our country, we're non-persons."

There are a few educational scenes with Karen that show the ways depression can affect a teenager--it's evidently what caused her own suicide, and she calls it "the blue fog."

The most fun I had reading this book was hearing the hate-religion-fanatic, Pete, explain why he hates zombies:
"the demons' art is subtle, and the devil has many ways to ensnare a human soul. It would seem like the easiest thing to do is to go out with some right-thinking people and destroy every zombie you find, right? But the media puts it out there that the zombies are the victims, not the aggressors."
This was fun for me in specific ways. One, it's similar to what the John Freshwater supporters in my small town have said about media coverage of his trial. Two, I'm always wondering what goes through the minds of my kids' friends who belong to local churches that preach homophobia, and imagine that the term "right-thinking" can't be that far off the mark. Three, it's scary to realize how close you've come to someone who would, under different circumstances, be glad to take a shot at you; I bought a bag of apples at this week's farmer's market from a personable man and then, as I was walking away, saw that he had business cards on his table for Freshwater's tree farm and was glad I hadn't told him my name, as I've very publicly stated my position against the teaching of creationism in public schools.

So yes, this is a scary book. But it doesn't reveal what the true purpose of "The Foundation," featured since book one, is, or what the goal of its secret leader, "The Reverend" might be in the end. It doesn't show much about what kind of struggle is necessary in order for a reviled segment of society to reclaim its rights in an American society.

What it leaves me with is the unsatisfying answer of the Harry Potter books, "love." The most highly functional zombies are the ones who are loved. Okay, I did stick through six books before getting much more of an answer than that from Rowling. But I would sure like some indication from Waters that it's worth sticking with his series--something more than the lame joke that it would make a fellow zombie "feel badly" if Karen told him one of her many secrets.

Kiss of Life

The sequel to Generation Dead, by Daniel Waters, is now available. I reviewed an advance reading copy way back in December (Kiss of Life review), and now you can read it. Then you can tell me if you liked it as much as I did.
(Update: Daniel Waters and I, who do not know each other, have evidently formed a mutual admiration society; see three cheers for necromancy!)

Breathers

From my local college bookstore, I read the ARC of Breathers, a brand-new novel by S.G. Browne, which capitalizes on several current trends.

The first is the zombie haiku craze, started by Ryan Mecum's Zombie Haiku, in which the haiku tells a story, and which now has spawned several websites (here's one) where you can submit your own haiku. Browne's protagonist, poor Andy Warner, who wakes up from the auto accident that killed his wife with a broken ankle and the kind of shoulder and facial injuries that make him look like a stereotypically scary zombie, also composes haiku. Here's a sample:
shattered life dangles
a severed voice screams in grief
i'm rotting inside

The second trend is the comparison of how an impossibly monstrous creature feels to how a human being could feel, done best by Daniel Waters in Generation Dead and repeated for comic effect in Breathers. Almost every chapter has some variation on "if you've never," from an early one: "if you've never seen someone get his arm torn out of his socket by a gang of drunk, college fraternity boys who then slapped him in the face with his own hand, then you probably wouldn't understand" to the penultimate: "if you've never raided a fraternity to exact mortal revenge for the immolation of the woman you love, your unborn child, and your best friend, then you probably wouldn't understand."

Browne's plot also imitates the plot of Generation Dead in its main character's awakening to the injustice in the complete lack of rights for the undead, but with more of a comic-book feel:
"It's not like I reanimated with a five-year plan. And no one exactly prepped me on How to Be a Zombie. It's a big adjustment, harder than you might imagine. After all, I still have the same basic hopes and desires I had when I was alive, but now they're unattainable. I may as well wish for wings."
"Yeah!" I thought, trying to entertain myself with this book while sitting in the sun outside where my son's chess tournament was being held, overlooking the Ohio river on one side and the Bengals football stadium on the other, "that would be fun!" But he doesn't get wings.

What he does get is his first taste of human flesh, "breathers," as living humans are called. But it's okay, at first he thinks it's venison. By the time he realizes it's human and that it has mysterious healing powers, making him look less like a stereotypical scary zombie, he's killing and eating his parents (he begins with his mother's ribs, mmm-mmm).

The back story on why some people reanimate and others don't also strikes me as superfluous and silly:
"Zombies have been around for decades, blending in with the local homeless population of just about every town in the country since the Great Depression...You don't find many zombies in the southern states, since heat tends to speed up decomposition. That and when you're a zombie in a region that has a reputation of prejudice against minorities and outsiders, you tend to stick out like good taste in a country-western bar."

The sympathy that I felt for Andy upon learning that he's reduced to living in his parents' basement, he can be picked up by the SPCA for taking a walk, and that he's not allowed to see his daughter is gone by the time he begins eating "breathers" and says "I'd hate to think that I'd look at my daughter and wonder how she'd taste in an asparagus and cheese casserole." And it's not only my sympathy that disappears, but also most of the point of the "if you've never..." comparisons, aside from their comic aspect.

All in all, I'd say that this book will meet its best fate as a movie, and it's evidently already slated for the screen. If you like monster movies, this one will be entertaining, but I think I can live without the refrigerator scenes.

Vive La Difference

Last May I reviewed Generation Dead, by Daniel Waters, and said it raises some interesting issues, like the difference between fiction and lies, and what it means to wear ultra-pale makeup and black clothing in a world in which teenagers come back from the dead, and the teachers at the high school require their classmates to use the politically correct term for them, which is "differently biotic." Well, a few weeks ago I was excited to receive an advance reading copy of Kiss of Life, which takes up where Generation Dead left off. This book won't be published until May, 2009, and I'll be waiting impatiently for you all to be able to read it, because it continues the story of the acceptance campaign for the dead kids, who call themselves zombies, and shows how easy it is to spread fear of those who are different.

Like Stephanie Meyers' Twilight series and Cassandra Clare's City of Bones series, this series deals with how difficult it is for a girl to choose between a guy who has always been a friend and a guy who is new, exciting, dangerous, and different. Also like Meyers and Clare, Waters is more interested in the effects of the dead having risen than he is in the cause of their rising.

And yet the "cause" of the dead is the focus of the book. At various points, the way the dead and their advocates work to advance their rights implicitly compares them to people who work for affirmative action, homosexuals, the blind, the paralyzed, and the deaf. Early on, some of the zombies call themselves "sons of Romero" and declare themselves uninterested in mixing with "the beating hearts," much like some deaf people declare themselves uninterested in learning to read lips and being able to get along in the hearing world. The way some churches are arrayed against their cause and revelations like "it was common practice for bioists to blame zombies for the 'crime' of being undead, as though they'd chosen such a fate" are clearly akin to current gay rights struggles. The parallels with the civil rights struggle are most striking, of course, with one zombie girl "passing" as a live girl, and Tommy, the hero of Generation Dead, striking out to combat prejudice in the style of Martin Luther King, Jr., while Tak, who was a more marginal figure in the previous book, rises to prominence in the style of Malcolm X.

The fun part of Kiss of Life is the ironic attitude of the "zombies," and the wordplay inevitably associated with talking about them. At their hangout from the first book, the "haunted house," they have an "unliving room." In Kiss of Life, there's a zombie nightclub called "Aftermath," and the decorations there include a series of posters from movies like "Night of the Living Dead." At one point Colette, who has become more functional as she has been more loved, is talking to the lead zombie singer of the band Skeleton Crew, who have been playing at Aftermath, and Phoebe sees them "talking animatedly" and then thinks "wrong word." When she asks Colette what they were saying, Colette tells her "That. . . annoying boy . . . kept saying the word . . . 'groundbreaking.' Not good . . . word choice . . . for a zombie."

The ironic centerpiece of Kiss of Life is the murder trial of Pete Martinsburg, who shot Adam at the end of Generation Dead. As Pete's lawyer says, why is he required " to go through the charade of a murder trial when the supposed victim walked into the room under his own power"? And yet it seems that most of the people at the trial fail to understand how profoundly Adam's "life" has changed.

I like the chapters in which Adam, or "FrankenAdam" as he calls himself when he first comes back from the dead minus most of his ability to move or talk, speaks for himself. They make the book's later reminders that he has no legal rights, as a dead person, even more horrifying. While one dead kid laments the fact that although he has plenty of time to read he can't get a library card, Adam escapes being hauled off to prison, at the end of the book, for the crime of being undead merely because his parents have not rejected him, although one of his brothers fears and hates him.

As there always is with prejudice, there's fear on both sides. The zombies fear being "reterminated." There are stories of people crucifying them, burning them at the stake, even impersonating them and framing them for crimes designed to turn public opinion against them. The "real people," as they call themselves, say that the activities that the zombies design to raise consciousness about their plight are wrong because "that kind of activity just scares decent living folk." By the end of the book, it's clear that the two sides are at war because they don't wait to be introduced before labeling the other: names for the dead include "corpsicle" and "worm burger," while names for the living include "bleeders" and "beating hearts." In public, they call each other "traditionally biotic" and "differently biotic," but we see how much use that is at Aftermath where one bathroom door is labelled "Trad" and the other "Dead," even though the doors open into the same room. There is a name for sympathizers, "necrophiliacs," and also for separatist zombies, "trulydeads."

The Kiss of Life turns out to be a lipstick color, not something that will magically make the dead "normal" again. It's clear that cutting up a dead girl to see what makes her work is not the answer to finding "the secret of life." But as the song from Casablanca says, "a kiss is still a kiss." It's still something everyone desires, living or dead, and perhaps the only good answer to the question of what to do in the kind of world in which necromancy has become a reality. There's the potential for a later kiss in Phoebe's answer to the trick-or-treater who sees Adam, newly dead, sitting behind her in the kitchen and asks "That a dead guy?" She says "That's Adam."

And the kid's reply is like my response to this book. " 'Hey, Adam,' the kid yelled. The little vampire turned back to her. 'He's dead. Like me!' " Only by identifying with someone different can you understand what their life is like, and hope for something more than just tolerance, as people did watching The Laramie Project in the wake of Matthew Shepard's murder. But the humor inextricably tied to the ability to (literally) embrace difference is what humanizes the monsters, dead or alive.

Fiction and Lies

Back in the 16th century, some people called fiction "lies" because it wasn't true; someone had made it up. We have come so far by the 21st century that a fictional character, Tommy from Daniel Waters' Generation Dead, has his own blog. He posts entries fairly frequently and even replies to comments at http://mysocalledundeath.blogspot.com/ . One of the comments on his most recent post was "RU real?" He replied that you had to read a book by Daniel Waters to know about him, which seems to me to be a disingenuous echo of Huck Finn saying

"You don't know me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth mainly. There were things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied, one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly--Tom's Aunt Polly, she is--and Mary, and the widow Douglas, is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book; with stretchers, as I said before."

If Twain had the technology and the time, maybe he would have enjoyed prolonging the blurring of the line between truth and exaggeration by inventing a blog for Huck. Hmm.

At any rate, Generation Dead raises some interesting issues. That's pretty much all it does; it raises them. Almost everyone I've talked to who has read it agrees that it is positioned for a sequel (which also explains the updating of "Tommy's" blog, doesn't it?). My daughter, who bought the book, agrees with me in not liking books in which the conflict is not fully resolved.

But the issues it raises are very interesting, especially to the target YA audience. The cover illustration shows a girl wearing eye makeup eerily similar to the makeup that one of Eleanor's friend shows up in every morning. (Once we took this girl to The Olive Garden, and a little girl who was walking towards the restroom took one look at her and went back and got her mother before she would go any farther past that girl with the black circles around her eyes.) And the cover illustration does reflect one of the issues in the book: what does it mean to dress like a "Goth" and listen to groups like Grave Mistake in a world where teenagers come back from the dead and go to your high school?

Eleanor, at 14, responded to the school's enforcement of politically correct terms for the teenagers who have risen from the dead:

"You aren't supposed to call them zombies...."
"Zombies, dead heads, corpsicles. What's the difference?"
...."You could be expelled for saying things like that...You know you're supposed to call them living impaired."

As the book goes on, the term "living impaired" is rejected in favor of "differently biotic" and it is revealed that in groups of their own, the dead kids call themselves zombies, but they don't like living kids to call them that as a perjorative term.

The verisimilitude is wonderful, and one of the reasons I think Eleanor responds to the fiction. She came home from school a few weeks ago and said she had a thought during art class and that led to another thought about guns and someone blowing up the school, and then she looked around guiltily before she realized that there's (as yet) no penalty for thinking about prohibited topics while at school!!!

Related to the pc terms are the activities of the acceptance campaigners who give out t-shirts with slogans like "Zombie Power!" and "Some of My Best Friends are Dead." Their stated aim is to transform the culture so that dead teenagers are accepted and no longer discriminated against. This discrimination theme is exaggerated enough to remain funny all the way through the book (no easy task, really). The high point is when a teacher tells a group of teenagers (some dead, some alive) that:

"Transformation always requires radical action. If Elvis Presley had not taken the radical action of singing a style of music traditionally sung by black people, we may never have had the transformation that rock and roll enacted on modern society. If Martin Luther King had not taken the radical action of organizing and speaking around the cause of civil rights, we may have never undergone the transformation from an oppressive state to one of freedom and equal opportunity for all. And that transformation is not yet complete. You kids are living--or unliving, as the case may be--proof of that."

Another thing we both really enjoyed (especially in light of the recent Freshwater controversy) was the occasional mention of religious groups who discriminate against the dead. At a school assembly, one girl says
"My dad says that it isn't natural, people coming back from the dead. He says that there's stuff in the Bible that talks about the dead coming up out of their graves, and that it means the world will end soon."
The teacher in charge of the assembly responds by saying "With all due respect to your father's beliefs...we have found nothing in our extensive studies that suggests the phenomena of the differently biotic is a sign of the Apocalypse. Of course, we could be wrong, but we prefer to look at the phenomenon as a scientific puzzle to be answered rather than a metaphysical conundrum."

Later in the book, we get to read some of the hate mail addressed to those on the "side" of the dead, and it's hilarious... I might wish it sounded a little less like some of the recent letters to the editor in my small-town newspaper...

Which brings me back to fiction as "lies." Isn't it pleasant when someone writes a book that can make us laugh about issues we're too close to to be able to see clearly? Some things are, no doubt, "stretched," but it seems to me that much of this book "tells the truth, mainly."