Review of Deadline

Book 38: Deadline (The Newsflesh Trilogy, Book Two) by Mira Grant, isbn 9780316081061, 608 pages, Orbit,  $9.99


The Premise: (from the back cover): "Shaun Mason is a man without a mission. Not even running the news organization he built with his sister has the same urgency as it used to. Playing with dead things just doesn't seem as much fun when you've lost as much as he has. But when a CDC researcher fakes her own death and appears on his doorstep with a ravenous pack of zombies in tow, Shaun has a newfound interest in life. Because she brings news -- he may have put down the monster who attacked them, but the conspiracy is far from dead. Now, Shaun hits the road again to find what truth can be found at the end of a shotgun."



My Rating:  4 stars


My Thoughts: At the end of my review of FEED, I said, "I can also say (and I doubt anyone would be surprised) that FEED is the first of a trilogy. I'm not sure how quickly I'll rush out to pick up book two, DEADLINE. I think FEED stands well enough on its own that I don't necessarily feel the need to see the story continued; I guess my decision will rest solely on how much I miss the surviving members of Team Mason by the time the new book hits the stands."

Obviously, I missed the surviving members of Team Mason far more than I thought I did. I bought DEADLINE the moment I saw it on the shelf. It took me another week or two to get around to reading it, and it's been over a week since I finished reading it, but I don't regret snapping it up as soon as I saw it.

Any complaints I had about the first book, in terms of characterization or the same-ness of the different characters' blog entries, are pretty much gone in this book. The pacing is excellent. The new characters (or the old supporting characters with increased importance and screen-time) fill out the cast nicely in the wake of the main characters lost in FEED. Becks, Mahir, Alaric, Kelly -- all add more depth to a story told entirely through the lens of Shaun Mason's slowly increasing insanity.

Yes, Shaun is going insane thanks to what happened in FEED. No doubt about it. The other characters know it, and any reader who writes it off as hyperbole or as some clever trick of the author -- no, sorry. He's nuts. He knows he's nuts. He's functioning (barely, some days) but he's nuts. Actually, I take that back -- there is a clever trick on the author's part. The trick is in making us understand that Shaun is almost certifiable and yet still making us believe he can solve whatever problems the team is faced with as he tries to dig deeper into the conspiracy that has effectively ruined his life and is quite possibly going to ruin the world.

I described FEED as a "zombie political thriller ala ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN."  I've been describing FEED to people as a "zombie medical thriller ala Robin Cook's books."  Once again, while the zombies are the every-day problem the characters need to deal with, it's the medical conspiracy Kelly brings to the team's attention that is the main focus of the book (just as the political campaign intrigue was the focus of FEED).  And I think this is why I'm enjoying Mira Grant's books far more than any other print zombie story I've ever read -- because the zombies are there, but the focus is on a bigger story than just "let's try to survive while undead creatures try to eat us."

Once again, I find I can't say too much about what really makes the book work for me without spoiling major events.  So it'll have to suffice, I suppose, if I say that the events at the close of FEED provide the major momentum for the events of DEADLINE, and the last 20 pages of DEADLINE will provide the momentum of the final book in the trilogy, BLACKOUT.   And this time, there's no doubt in my mind: I will be picking BLACKOUT up the week it hits the stands, and probably reading it that quick.  I need to see how this whole thing wraps up.

Feed By Mira Grant

Book 62: Feed by Mira Grant, isbn 9780316081054, 599 pages, Orbit, $9.99

I have to admit up front that I only picked up FEED because it was the October entry in the online book club run by calico_reaction and I always read as much horror as I can in the month of October anyway. I also have to admit that really, I'm not a zombie fiction fan. For me, zombies work great on the screen (I love the original Romero trilogy as well as 28 Days/Weeks Later) but don't seem to have the same hold over me in print. So I was skeptical that I'd really get anything out of this book other than a chance to say "I told you so" and an addition to my year's total page-count.

Thankfully, I can say my skepticism was wrong. While I don't think FEED is anywhere near a perfect book, I can say that overall it worked for me: the characters clicked and a couple of the action sequences got my heart racing a bit.

In 2014, super-cures for cancer and the common cold are released to the air, and combine to create Kellis-Amberlee, the virus that brings the recently dead back to life with an insatiable hunger. Twenty years later, people live in rigidly-defined hazard zones based on the likelihood of encounter with Infected (humans or other mammals). Society hangs in there under a constant cloud of fear, and faith in traditional news media is low. Twenty years after the Uprising, more people trust Bloggers in the world of FEED, and two of the most well-regarded bloggers are "Newsie" (hard-news reporter) Georgia Mason and "Irwin" (adventure-based reporter) Shaun Mason, a brother-and-sister team aided by their technical support and fiction-writing third partner "Buffy" Messionier. The team is tapped by Senator Peter Ryman to accompany his Presidential Campaign, from before the party primaries all the way up to Election Day if they go that far. Georgia, Shaun, Buffy and new team member Rick discover they are on to the biggest story of their careers, and it's bigger than just following a candidate around.

The book starts off a bit rocky, in my opinion, with a lot of the world-building info repeated almost ad nauseum not just from chapter to chapter but occasionally from page to page. Most of the first section of the book (which is divided up into five distinct sections) feels like an info-dump. While it establishes the characters of Georgia, Shaun and Buffy very clearly, it also repeats so much information over and over again that you begin to wonder if Georgia, who narrates, is the reporter she's built up to be. But if you can get past the first hundred pages, the narrative kicks in and the characters spend a lot less time repeating themselves. The baseline information about the world they live in has been driven home through repetition and the story can begin to move. The book gets good when it stops re-explaining how people get infected and what's been done to protect the populace and starts getting into what the book is really about: political machinations and the use of fear as a means of controlling the populace. Georgia and the team get an up-close-and-personal look at the political side of terrorism as well. The action sequences also get stronger, more pulse-racing, as the book goes along; it's almost like Grant knowingly saves her best action-prose for the end, although the fight in Eakly occurs relatively early in the book and contains at least one very tense moment.

To say too much more about the twists the book takes would be to spoil it for anyone who has not read it yet. I can say a few things. The encounters between Team Mason and the zombies start out almost mundane (see how silly we are, poking zombies with sticks to get higher ratings for our blog) and grow deadly serious (a multi-car-wreck has lasting effects on the team) right up to the very last pages. I was pretty sure I had tagged who was behind the terrorism early on, and I'm sure most astute readers will manage to figure it out too. But sometimes, knowing who the "big bad" is and knowing how events will reveal that "big bad" to the characters are two very different things, and the direction the reveal took very definitely surprised me. Each chapter ends, and each of the five sections begins, with quotes from the blogs of Georgia, Shaun, Buffy and Rick; flipping back through the book after I'd reached the end, I was not surprised to find that most of them gained a "you should have seen that coming, gentle reader" tone in hind-sight. If I have any complaint about those quoted passages, it is that they don't seem to have unique voices. For all the characters talk about how Newsies, Irwins and Fictionals approach the news with distinct voices, there wasn't anything particularly individual about the posts of Georgia, Shaun and Rick (Buffy is set apart because she's writing poetry about the events around them, not non-fiction reportage).

I can also say (and I doubt anyone would be surprised) that FEED is the first of a trilogy. I'm not sure how quickly I'll rush out to pick up book two, DEADLINE. I think FEED stands well enough on its own that I don't necessarily feel the need to see the story continued; I guess my decision will rest solely on how much I miss the surviving members of Team Mason by the time the new book hits the stands.