2. "Play Dead" by Ryan Brown

Ryan Brown manages to merge zombie lore, voodoo, high school football, small-town Texas, and teenage romance in Play Dead. The result pleasantly surprised me.

Cole Logan is quarterback of the Killington Jackrabbits, who are having their first winning season ever. He's also the son of the town's loose woman, inhabitant of a trailer that stands on cinderblocks, a sometime juvenile delinquent, and the neighbor of Black Mona, a crazy cat lady with a purported gift for black magic.

Unfortunately for Cole and his teammates, they're about to face the Elmwood Heights Badgers for the district championship. The Badgers play dirty, pumping themselves up with hybrid steroids and perpetrating acts of vandalism and destruction against the Jackrabbits. First they attack Cole and cut off two of his fingers. Then their attempt to prevent the Jackrabbits from reaching a game goes horribly awry, and the entire team drowns. Only Cole and the head coach escape.

Cole joins up with the coach's football-hating daughter, Savannah Hickham, a writer for the school paper with an eye on the biggest story of the year. Together, they enlist the help of Black Mona in resurrecting the team. She manages to bring the players back as zombies, but they have only a limited window of time before they "go bad," and if they lose their final game, all their souls will be forfeit.

Before the teams can meet on the playing field, however, Cole and Savannah have some pretty major problems to solve. There are 40 flesh-eating zombies roaming around Killington. The sheriff has arrested the entire Badgers lineup and isn't about to let them out of jail for a football game. And Savannah's father, haunted by an earlier tragedy, flatly refuses to coach the high-stakes game.

Parts of the book are predictable. Of course the Jackrabbits will win the game (but what happens to them after that?), and of course Cole and Savannah will fall in love. But what makes this book fun and quirky is how it gets from its entertaining premise to those foregone conclusions.

131. "World War Z" by Max Brooks

I'm not that into zombies (unlike vampires), so I wasn't sure I'd like World War Z by Max Brooks, but it received enough positive press that I figured I'd check it out. I'm glad I did! It's an innovative, sometimes dystopian and sometimes triumphant chronicle of a 10-year zombie war and the people who survived. The characters are strong and compelling; Brooks captures their many voices well, sometimes in only a few pages. Despite the different narrative voices, the continuity is strong, and the story builds effectively.

In many ways, this is a war novel more than a "horror" novel, with much emphasis on battle strategies and weaponry. But the human element is always present (indeed, Brooks' narrator states in the preface that his intent is to convey the human side of the conflict), and the ways in which people survive and rebuild their lives in a post-apocalyptic world are compelling. The characters' stories also show how people become better or worse in a crisis, how some who felt cast off in pre-war society found purpose and became leaders in the war, how military leaders had to choose between their humanity and their loyalty to country and the toll they paid.

I was left with only one question: Where did the plague originate? That is, what's the back story of the zombie that bit the first person to be "infected" and ultimately triggered WWZ?

2. "Boneshaker" by Cherie Priest

I always enjoy reading books by local authors and/or books set in the place where I live. So I was intrigued enough to pick up Boneshaker by Cherie Priest a few months ago, especially because I've found a surprising lack of books set in Seattle. (I keep thinking there's a wealth of them and I just haven't found them yet, so please, feel free to recommend local titles and authors.) My copy, purchased at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, is autographed in green ink. I like autographs, but the green ink is particularly cool.

Before I continue, I should confess that I'm perpetually perplexed by the concept of steampunk. Having read this book, I clearly recognize that it's steampunk, but I still don't think I could articulate any kind of cohesive or coherent definition if you dangled me off an airship above the Blight-ridden city of Seattle. But I'm getting ahead of myself....

Boneshaker is set in an alternate version of Seattle, in an alternate history in which the American Civil War lasts for more than 15 years, airships transport military squadrons and goods throughout the country, and an inventor named Leviticus Blue has created a monster in the form of a machine. His Boneshaker decimated Seattle and released a deadly gas known as the Blight, which transforms the people who breathe it into shambling, shuffling zombies. Fifteen years later, a high wall surrounds downtown Seattle to contain the Blight and the deadly "rotters." Blue's widow, Briar, and son, Zeke, live in the Outskirts, the area beyond the walls, where refugees fled during the chaos just after Boneshaker's only journey. When Zeke decides to seek information about his father, he finds a way into the walled city. His mother, tormented by guilt as well as love, resolves to follow and rescue him. Their separate journeys will bring them into contact with air pirates, a one-armed barmaid, a native princess, a conniving inventor trying to set himself up as Blue, a brilliant Chinese boy, legions of rotters, and a few unlikely heroes.


I had some trouble getting into the book, but the action picks up before page 100 and continues at a fast pace. Boneshaker is an entertaining, light read that would, I imagine, particularly appeal to sci-fi fans familiar with Seattle landmarks.