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A review by jcschildbach
Breathers: A Zombie's Lament by S.G. Browne
2.0
"Breathers" seems like it should have been an easier read than it was. It has short chapters, and isn't particularly demanding, and the gross-out stuff wasn't all that gross. But I had a hard time getting into it, despite a long-term love of most things zombie. Like many other reviews note, the pop-culture references are nearly constant, which makes the writing feel pretty lazy--letting references to movies and TV do a lot of the work, or at least fill up a lot of the space. Having the narrator living in a wine cellar with a TV set allowed several pages of the book to be taken up with just the names of wines and TV shows/movies (although not all at once).
As other reviewers have also noted, there seems to be way too much of an attempt to emulate Chuck Palahniuk. But, as anyone who has read Pahlaniuk knows, Pahlaniuk's writing reaches depths of macabre humor and depravity that cannot be achieved in a work on a subject as mild as zombies. And Pahlaniuk's pop-culture references tend toward social critique, rather than hey-I-get-that-reference filler.
Which is not to say that Browne's book does not contain social critique. It does. Unfortunately, much of it is rather heavy-handed--having zombies caged by the SPCA when they get out of line, referencing Rosa Parks during a bus ride gone bad, and an especially annoying-bordering-on-offensive passage that enumerates the parallels between the zombies of "Breathers" and various members of minority groups in the history of the United States. It's as if Browne didn't expect his readers to pick up on the not-so-subtle social commentary without him spelling it all out.
In addition, the bulk of the "villains" were pretty flat--an uptight father and distant mother, an inattentive therapist, and frat boys.
And there were a number of things that just didn't make sense, like how the narrator could eat even though his face was too busted up to speak, and why the hot zombie chick was interested in the zombie guy whose face was so busted up that he couldn't speak. Also, given the alleged hysteria and discrimination aimed at the zombies, it seemed a bit of a stretch that, for instance, missing persons wouldn't automatically be attributed to foul play by zombies--and if the zombies are to blame, how the hell could they be getting away with it? Simply put, Browne frequently skates around things that need explaining. And providing the additional details would have helped steer away from that feeling of lazy writing and lazy plotting that pervades the book.
But perhaps the biggest problem with the book is that any sympathy that is built up for the zombies in the first half (which really isn't that much) is undone by the events of the second half, which would need to be a whole lot funnier and/or a whole lot more gruesome to hit the kind of payoff that a novel of this subject matter demands. Instead, Browne does not earn an emotional buy-in from the reader, so the more sentimental elements don't ring true, the comedy is merely amusing on occasion rather than riotously funny, and not a single gross-out element is actually disturbing enough to make a reader's skin crawl, much less to stay with the reader after the book is done.
As other reviewers have also noted, there seems to be way too much of an attempt to emulate Chuck Palahniuk. But, as anyone who has read Pahlaniuk knows, Pahlaniuk's writing reaches depths of macabre humor and depravity that cannot be achieved in a work on a subject as mild as zombies. And Pahlaniuk's pop-culture references tend toward social critique, rather than hey-I-get-that-reference filler.
Which is not to say that Browne's book does not contain social critique. It does. Unfortunately, much of it is rather heavy-handed--having zombies caged by the SPCA when they get out of line, referencing Rosa Parks during a bus ride gone bad, and an especially annoying-bordering-on-offensive passage that enumerates the parallels between the zombies of "Breathers" and various members of minority groups in the history of the United States. It's as if Browne didn't expect his readers to pick up on the not-so-subtle social commentary without him spelling it all out.
In addition, the bulk of the "villains" were pretty flat--an uptight father and distant mother, an inattentive therapist, and frat boys.
And there were a number of things that just didn't make sense, like how the narrator could eat even though his face was too busted up to speak, and why the hot zombie chick was interested in the zombie guy whose face was so busted up that he couldn't speak. Also, given the alleged hysteria and discrimination aimed at the zombies, it seemed a bit of a stretch that, for instance, missing persons wouldn't automatically be attributed to foul play by zombies--and if the zombies are to blame, how the hell could they be getting away with it? Simply put, Browne frequently skates around things that need explaining. And providing the additional details would have helped steer away from that feeling of lazy writing and lazy plotting that pervades the book.
But perhaps the biggest problem with the book is that any sympathy that is built up for the zombies in the first half (which really isn't that much) is undone by the events of the second half, which would need to be a whole lot funnier and/or a whole lot more gruesome to hit the kind of payoff that a novel of this subject matter demands. Instead, Browne does not earn an emotional buy-in from the reader, so the more sentimental elements don't ring true, the comedy is merely amusing on occasion rather than riotously funny, and not a single gross-out element is actually disturbing enough to make a reader's skin crawl, much less to stay with the reader after the book is done.