Reviews - Zombabe | The StoryGraph

93 reviews for:

Zombabe

I.S. Belle

4.13 AVERAGE

authorlibrarianrachel's review against another edition

4.75

adventurous dark funny informative mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

laurel00's review against another edition

3.0

mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Right off the bat: did I enjoy reading this book? Yeah. Do I also have very complicated feelings about it? Absolutely. Would I recommend it? I’m not sure.

Starting off with the good:

I did enjoy reading this book. It evoked some emotion in me, I liked a lot of the characters, I think the story is really interesting, I think the writing is good. It took me a bit of time to get through it, but only because of my schedule at this moment. Otherwise, I would have finished this within a weekend.

I would have to say that my favourite character in the book is Dude. He was the one that made me feel the most. I got the most attached to him out of all the characters. I think that he’s extremely endearing, and very well written as just a young boy, with a truly kind heart and an unwavering loyalty to his friends. His passages were the ones that resonated with me the most, and he was the star of the story for me.

I also really enjoyed the found family aspect in general. I don’t know if it’s my favourite found family that I’ve come across in books, but I do think it’s well executed, and it fits really well in the small-town environment.

Finally, I do think Belle does a really good job of laying out the complex feelings a person has with regards to living in a small town. There was some great critique in there, some amazing nuance. It’s portrayed under a sort of “toxic relationship” angle where the characters don’t know if they love it or hate it. Maybe it’s a bit of both, but it gets harder and harder to draw the line between the two. The longer you stay, the more unwaveringly loyal you become to staying in it, even if you know deep down it isn’t what you always wanted. I personally never grew up in a small town, so I can’t really speak to the accuracy of it, but it did feel realistic, and I think the book does a good job of addressing a lot of the issues Belle set out to discuss in her story.

Now, onto the critiques.

It’s hard for me to explain myself without spoiling some things, so I will have to tag the rest of my review as spoiler. As a general idea, although I did enjoy the book, I can’t say that I was super into it. I feel like it could have done more, and there were quite a lot of moments that felt like they should be emotionally charged but didn’t evoke much in me—or at least not as much as I was hoping for.

Also, I think some of the story’s message gets kind of lost. Horror is my favourite genre, and I love that you can do so much with it when it comes to the actual substance and depth of your novel. But I think it’s important to make sure that your message is clear to your reader, and I feel like there’s so much nuance and so much grey area here, that it gets kind of lost. I understand wanting to address the certain complexities of bigotry, small town living, human nature… but there needs to eventually be some kind of conclusion, a stance that the book takes on these issues. And I don’t know if this novel really did that clearly enough.

First of all, a big portion of the book makes this parallel between Babe being a zombie and him being gay. His new inner voice and the “creature” that controls him often tell him to just “let go”, that it would be so much more satisfying to “give in”. Belle uses the word hunger to describe both his actual zombie hunger to eat people, as well as his “hunger” (i.e.: romantic desire) for his best friend Dude. At first, I was really excited by this. I think it had so much potential as a set up, and I couldn’t wait to see what Belle was going to say with this parallel. I’ve spoken about this in some other reviews, but the relationship between the monster and the main character in the horror genre is so important and you can do so much with it, and I was so excited to see where this was going.

But then… it didn’t really go anywhere in the end. I mean, objectively speaking, it’s not morally correct to eat people. And sure, if he only hungered for the bad people in his town, maybe there would be some message there. In fact, I thought it was going that way once he “felt full” after eating one of the town’s bigots. That satisfaction could be very invocative of the satisfaction a queer person feels once they finally get rid of some kind of negativity or bigotry in their lives.

But Babe often hungered, both metaphorically and literally, for Dude as well. So, the parallel between his queerness and his zombie-ness being so glaringly obvious in these scenes, my brain couldn’t help but draw the line that being gay = bad and dangerous. I want to make this very clear: this isn’t the actual message of the book. But then I have to ask… what is it? I thought Belle was going to go down the route of “your monstrosity/queerness is only bad in people’s perceptions of you, and you’re trying to get rid of it because people are telling you it’s bad, but really, you should embrace it for xyz reason”. But I didn’t really see that. Babe agreed that his zombie-ness was bad, there was no question about it. So then… why is it being so explicitly compared to his queerness?

Throughout the entire book, Babe actively tries to get rid of or ignore both his monstrosity and the fact that he's gay. In the end, he does get rid of the monster and his zombie-ness, and he musters up the courage to finally kiss Dude. So then… what does that mean? Why set up this perfect parallel between hungering for his friend in two antithetical yet symbiotic ways, only for him to reject one and accept the other? I don’t see what the message is, or what the book was trying to tell me with this parallel. I’ve tried to come up with something cohesive, but I can only think of a bunch of half-ideas that I can’t seem to conclude in an accurate and satisfying way.

I also have a big problem with Kate. Now, I get that Belle really wanted to get across this idea that small-town living can be like a poison, and the longer you stay in that environment the worst you get. All the characters in this book were heavily nuanced, in that although they may be well-meaning and not necessarily evil people, they make a lot of mistakes and they’re so stuck in their ways that they don’t try to be good or better themselves.

That being said, Kate is objectively not a good person, and even though she’s an important secondary character—she even gets her own chapters from time to time—there is absolutely no character development on her part. She’s the only clear lesbian in this story, but she’s a cop: and a terrible one at that. She confessed to 1- having a tendency to whip out her gun instead of trying to talk someone down and 2- helping cover up a sexual assault.

Once again, I thought Belle was going to do something with Kate’s character to express a message, teach a lesson, take a stance. “Even queer people can be bad people and bigots, and we should address these issues.” But nope. Kate never really suffers any consequences. She gets a relatively happy ending, just like all the other important characters. Her bad actions as a cop and abuse of authority never get brought up again. So… what was the point? Her character is mainly used to help the kids get around and cover things up for them. But then why lay out this whole character arc for her if you’re never going to address it again? Was I supposed to like her? I definitely wasn’t rooting for her. Honestly, I didn’t care much about her—and that’s saying something considering how much I hang onto lesbian characters in media.

Overall, I think I’m just underwhelmed. There were so many avenues down which this story could have gone; so many things that could have been expressed or addressed. And I feel like the book didn’t choose any of them. I wanted so much more from it, so I’m a bit disappointed.

In the end, I still might recommend this book to some people, depending on what kind of reader they are. If you want an easy horror read that isn’t too scary and does feature some endearing main characters, you might enjoy this. You do have to be prepared for a lot of bigotry though: racism, homophobia, fatphobia (just to name a few). I don’t think this was a bad book, per se. I was, however, expecting a lot more from it. I think Belle has a ton of potential to grow as an author, so I am definitely excited to see where her career takes her. But I wouldn’t put this book, in its current state, at the top of my recommendations lists.

I received an advance review copy of this book for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

jackalopecore's review against another edition

4.0

adventurous dark emotional lighthearted mysterious fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Content Warnings

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