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3.8 AVERAGE
3.8 AVERAGE
In a world full of zombie novels, this one is really unique and strangely beautiful - despite being pretty grim and gory. The back of the book describes it as Southern Gothic zombie. It is that, with rotting mansions and an old wealthy family with secrets, but there's also a wild west element to the story. It all leads up to a showdown between the protagonist and her sort of fated antagonist, in an apocalyptic landscape. I don't know how I feel about the ending yet, but I can say that I think it was as unique as the rest of the book...and that this story will linger in my memory for a long time.
Another thing I really liked about this book was the lens through which the main character sees the zombie infested world - it's still a place of "crackerjack miracles" and things she wants to see and learn and be. She was born into it, it's just how the world is for her. All of that adds a layer of painful, tender hope to a hopeless, violent, bloody life, and that makes the whole thing ache a little bit, in the way that makes a story stronger.
Another thing I really liked about this book was the lens through which the main character sees the zombie infested world - it's still a place of "crackerjack miracles" and things she wants to see and learn and be. She was born into it, it's just how the world is for her. All of that adds a layer of painful, tender hope to a hopeless, violent, bloody life, and that makes the whole thing ache a little bit, in the way that makes a story stronger.
The book overall has a feel of something between Cormac McCarthy's The Road and AMC's The Walking Dead, which made it sort of an interesting voice, but it was really hard to get a feel for the character. I didn't make an emotional connection with the heroine, and that made the story fall flat.
This is a post-apocalyptic zombie novel that is unequivocally influenced by William Faulkner, from its style to its themes to some plot points and the names of its two main characters, not to mention most of the bit parts. When I noticed the names Temple and Maury in the review, I knew the author was up to something. I might go so far as to call it a mash-up, IF there weren't so many of those floating around after a certain zombie mash-up became a bestseller. And I'd argue that it's better than all of them.
Temple is a great character, and there is a long journey to deliver a body -- in this case a living one -- through a landscape of walking dead, to a family that may or may not still be there. She grapples with her identity, with her baser instincts, with her perceptions of God and duty and right and wrong in a broken world. History is a living, swirling thing, and "The past is never dead. It's not even past." In fact, it's still walking around. Aldon Bell also channels Faulkner when he describes so lyrically the bits of beauty that are always ensconced in decay, and the broad sweeping descriptions of the horizon and the road and the land.
"She raises her gaze and her eyes blur teary in the cool wind and all the lights of the city go wild and multiple, and she wipes her eyes and sits in one of the chairs and looks out beyond the periphery of the power grid where the black rolls out like an ocean."
Despite the fact that it borders on derivative much of the time, I found this book to be enjoyable, thought-provoking, smart, and occasionally really beautiful. I would have never thought that I'd read a zombie novel, but look at that, the pigs are flying.
It felt pretty episodic, which is neither here nor there. And I didn't like the last two sentences. But oh well. It is totally worth reading.
Temple is a great character, and there is a long journey to deliver a body -- in this case a living one -- through a landscape of walking dead, to a family that may or may not still be there. She grapples with her identity, with her baser instincts, with her perceptions of God and duty and right and wrong in a broken world. History is a living, swirling thing, and "The past is never dead. It's not even past." In fact, it's still walking around. Aldon Bell also channels Faulkner when he describes so lyrically the bits of beauty that are always ensconced in decay, and the broad sweeping descriptions of the horizon and the road and the land.
"She raises her gaze and her eyes blur teary in the cool wind and all the lights of the city go wild and multiple, and she wipes her eyes and sits in one of the chairs and looks out beyond the periphery of the power grid where the black rolls out like an ocean."
Despite the fact that it borders on derivative much of the time, I found this book to be enjoyable, thought-provoking, smart, and occasionally really beautiful. I would have never thought that I'd read a zombie novel, but look at that, the pigs are flying.
It felt pretty episodic, which is neither here nor there. And I didn't like the last two sentences. But oh well. It is totally worth reading.
I’m glad I read Megan's review, or I might have overlooked this slim but very satisfying post-apocalyptic story.
If you are looking for thrills, mad and ravenous zombies, and intense gore, look elsewhere. You won’t find it here. Not that there isn’t violence or zombies, it’s just that they don’t overpower the story.
Without family or a place to live, 15-year-old Temple wanders around a bleak and barren landscape ravaged by zombies. Many of the human survivors live in groups, sheltering themselves from the outside world.
Nothing is mentioned about how the zombies came to be, but that’s OK. This is not their story, after all. This is a story about Temple, her grief, the things she must do to survive, her thoughts and reflections, her loneliness, her self-loathing, the people she meets, and the beauty that can be found in such grim circumstances.
It’s not a book you’ll easily forget.
If you are looking for thrills, mad and ravenous zombies, and intense gore, look elsewhere. You won’t find it here. Not that there isn’t violence or zombies, it’s just that they don’t overpower the story.
Without family or a place to live, 15-year-old Temple wanders around a bleak and barren landscape ravaged by zombies. Many of the human survivors live in groups, sheltering themselves from the outside world.
Nothing is mentioned about how the zombies came to be, but that’s OK. This is not their story, after all. This is a story about Temple, her grief, the things she must do to survive, her thoughts and reflections, her loneliness, her self-loathing, the people she meets, and the beauty that can be found in such grim circumstances.
It’s not a book you’ll easily forget.
The Reapers Are the Angels has some good stuff going for it: there’s a strong female lead (even if she is a bit of a [scruffy, angry] manic pixie dream girl); the zombies are just one part of the long cross-country journey; and the prose is full of pretty, literary phrases like
“you can’t put nothing past these southern boys. They just sit around waiting for somebody to kill their brother so they can get started on some vengeance. It’s like a dang vocation with them.”
The first chapter could survive alone as a short story.
However. I hated the author’s use of a nonverbal, disabled character as a plot device. This character, Maury, only exists a) to be the connecting factor between Temple and the man she’s trying to escape, and b) to make the audience like Temple even more because she takes care of this “dummy.” (He is also referred to as a “feeb” by the unlikable Albert in chapter 8, when Temple-- in comparison-- finally starts making a habit of using Maury’s name, instead of just referring to him as dummy.)
Maury is an important character to the story, but the author doesn’t actually bother to write him into it. He’s a passive character, and things happen to him/people speak to him, but we never see him do anything or get past his “slow, heavy-lidded eyes”/"sad, thick eyes”/"dense, flat eyes” to his perspective, experiences, or desires. Author Alden Bell seems to enjoy pointing out Maury’s uselessness to Temple, and over-describes Maury’s body in every passage he’s in. He writes that Maury is a “big slobbery mess” who, in one passage, chews on nothing but his jaws “move in small slow circles like the jaw of a cow.” He makes sounds “inarticulate, like a mewling baby” or a “long wail, absent of meaning.” (It’s worth noting that his wail ‘absent of meaning’ occurs when Temple stops the car to yell out the window at a giant figure “human but disfigured, part of the skull exposed, one eye crazy wide and the other sleepy lidded, a pallor the color of moss or rot” in the hopes of drawing the figure out of the bush so she can get a better look.)
I could quote more but I’m annoyed and you get the picture. This book may be full of pretty little southern gothic phrases, but it’s no good to me.
“you can’t put nothing past these southern boys. They just sit around waiting for somebody to kill their brother so they can get started on some vengeance. It’s like a dang vocation with them.”
The first chapter could survive alone as a short story.
However. I hated the author’s use of a nonverbal, disabled character as a plot device. This character, Maury, only exists a) to be the connecting factor between Temple and the man she’s trying to escape, and b) to make the audience like Temple even more because she takes care of this “dummy.” (He is also referred to as a “feeb” by the unlikable Albert in chapter 8, when Temple-- in comparison-- finally starts making a habit of using Maury’s name, instead of just referring to him as dummy.)
Maury is an important character to the story, but the author doesn’t actually bother to write him into it. He’s a passive character, and things happen to him/people speak to him, but we never see him do anything or get past his “slow, heavy-lidded eyes”/"sad, thick eyes”/"dense, flat eyes” to his perspective, experiences, or desires. Author Alden Bell seems to enjoy pointing out Maury’s uselessness to Temple, and over-describes Maury’s body in every passage he’s in. He writes that Maury is a “big slobbery mess” who, in one passage, chews on nothing but his jaws “move in small slow circles like the jaw of a cow.” He makes sounds “inarticulate, like a mewling baby” or a “long wail, absent of meaning.” (It’s worth noting that his wail ‘absent of meaning’ occurs when Temple stops the car to yell out the window at a giant figure “human but disfigured, part of the skull exposed, one eye crazy wide and the other sleepy lidded, a pallor the color of moss or rot” in the hopes of drawing the figure out of the bush so she can get a better look.)
I could quote more but I’m annoyed and you get the picture. This book may be full of pretty little southern gothic phrases, but it’s no good to me.
Beautiful language, and a unique perspective on life. Sometimes you need to see things through the eyes of someone very different from yourself.
Reminded me of The Road, but less depressing. :-)
Reminded me of The Road, but less depressing. :-)
This book has so much against it that it’s a miracle anyone picks it up at all. Firstly, I’ve learned the slow and painful lesson that you should avoid books with pretty covers, regardless of how many rave reviews it has. It’s cover-snobbery, only in reverse. Second, I hated hated hated The Road and had absolutely no desire to read a young adult version of that literary abomination. Third, I think I’m slowly burning out on zombies. Yes, they’re cool, and they’re the ultimate in terror because oh man how do you run from the dead when the dead is everywhere, and how do you kill something that in your mind is still human? But by the same token, they’re clichéd and I’m just… ready to move on to something besides zombies.
But I found myself drawn to this novel anyway, and I’m glad I got over those convictions enough to open it.
The book just grabbed me. It is rough, written in present tense with no quotation marks. But it worked for this one. It flowed, just like everything in this novel flowed. I found myself drawn into Temple’s world, seeing things through her eyes and finding new things to orient myself around, as she couldn’t read and had only vague ideas of where she was.
Temple is a fifteen year old girl who is on the run, both from a person and from the demons of her past. She is a child, but an adult all at the same time. She was born into a world where zombies (meatskins or slugs, actually; I don’t know that I specifically remember seeing the word “zombie” in this whole work more than a couple of times) are a way of life, and she has learned to accept them as just a part of her world—as one of God’s creatures—without fear, but she has learned that sometimes she has to do what she needs to in order to survive. Her story unfolds in a very believable way—you don’t see the world fall apart, it just is; you aren’t told what’s made her the way she is, you are shown over small snippets until the end.
Speaking of the end—the end of this novel? Frustrating and perfect all at once. It can’t be any other way, but God, I wanted to turn the page and see “smile, you’re on Candid Camera” or something like that.
So, I’ve gone on and on… things I liked about this book. I liked not knowing exactly where Temple was located. I loved her as a character—Temple is easily one of those characters that’s going to stick with me for a long time. In fact, I’d probably stay up all night thinking about Temple and the lesson that’s wrapped in between all the violence and gore in this book, if I hadn’t already been up all night the night before.
It’s literature. It’s marketed as young adult but this is one of those books that I have a really hard time shelving there. It’s literature. If this is the direction young adult would take, then I’d be happy with it.
Things I didn’t like about this novel… I’ve already mentioned that there aren’t quotation marks and that makes a novel rather hard to read at times. There are a few times when characters use French phrases and they’re deliberately misspelled (to sound phonetic, I suppose), and while this worked well to “put me” into Temple’s frame of mind, I also had to look at it a few times, reread it and figure out what it was supposed to say, and that pulls me out of the story and reminds me that I’m stuck in the real world and not in her world.
Overall, I thought this book was well-done and brilliant and I will definitely be reading it again.
But I found myself drawn to this novel anyway, and I’m glad I got over those convictions enough to open it.
The book just grabbed me. It is rough, written in present tense with no quotation marks. But it worked for this one. It flowed, just like everything in this novel flowed. I found myself drawn into Temple’s world, seeing things through her eyes and finding new things to orient myself around, as she couldn’t read and had only vague ideas of where she was.
Temple is a fifteen year old girl who is on the run, both from a person and from the demons of her past. She is a child, but an adult all at the same time. She was born into a world where zombies (meatskins or slugs, actually; I don’t know that I specifically remember seeing the word “zombie” in this whole work more than a couple of times) are a way of life, and she has learned to accept them as just a part of her world—as one of God’s creatures—without fear, but she has learned that sometimes she has to do what she needs to in order to survive. Her story unfolds in a very believable way—you don’t see the world fall apart, it just is; you aren’t told what’s made her the way she is, you are shown over small snippets until the end.
Speaking of the end—the end of this novel? Frustrating and perfect all at once. It can’t be any other way, but God, I wanted to turn the page and see “smile, you’re on Candid Camera” or something like that.
So, I’ve gone on and on… things I liked about this book. I liked not knowing exactly where Temple was located. I loved her as a character—Temple is easily one of those characters that’s going to stick with me for a long time. In fact, I’d probably stay up all night thinking about Temple and the lesson that’s wrapped in between all the violence and gore in this book, if I hadn’t already been up all night the night before.
It’s literature. It’s marketed as young adult but this is one of those books that I have a really hard time shelving there. It’s literature. If this is the direction young adult would take, then I’d be happy with it.
Things I didn’t like about this novel… I’ve already mentioned that there aren’t quotation marks and that makes a novel rather hard to read at times. There are a few times when characters use French phrases and they’re deliberately misspelled (to sound phonetic, I suppose), and while this worked well to “put me” into Temple’s frame of mind, I also had to look at it a few times, reread it and figure out what it was supposed to say, and that pulls me out of the story and reminds me that I’m stuck in the real world and not in her world.
Overall, I thought this book was well-done and brilliant and I will definitely be reading it again.
This was pretentious, ridiculous, and so religious it verges on hyperbole. The book was written in dialect that was strange and annoying, the world building made little to no sense (cars would not run 25 years later with no maintenance), the character motivations were paper thin, and when you finally become invested in the characters the book ends in tragedy. The only reason I rated it 2 stars was for the excellent narration.
An excellent new voice in zombie fiction, but please man, use quotation marks!