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On the whole, zombie novels, as opposed to zombie movies, risk being tedious. While the zombie itself, will-less and relentless, marching or shuffling at its master's demand, has a cinematic appeal, especially in black and white, zombies on the page are basically uninteresting. Vampires are sexy, werewolves are filled with self-loathing and embody the classical mind-body conflict. Vampires on the other hand lack the sort of inner tension and contradiction that can make them intriguing in themselves. They are a menace, and that's about it. This limitation does not discourage writers from trying to do something with zombies and Jonathan Maberry has done about as much as one can to, um, reanimate the genre. Rather than abandoning the clichés of the trope, he embraces them, relying on his considerable narrative talent to give them new life. We begin in Stebbins County Pennsylvania, located one imagines not too far from Grover's Mill, NJ. The first character we meet is Lee (Doc) Hartnup, the local mortician and he is dead, dead and to his horror, conscious of his condition. In short, he has been infected by his last client, a recently-executed serial killer. He has been reduced to a "hollow man," in Eliot's phrase, a zombie. And he will be but the first of many. Indeed, right next door, his large Russian cleaning woman is likewise dead, though this does not stop her from trying to tear the throat out of Desdemona (Dez) Fox, the policewoman investigating a report of a break-in at the mortuary. Dez's partner is Sgt TJ Hammond, a middle-aged black man with a degree in criminal justice who has never had to fire his service revolver. Dez, on the other hand, is not thirty and a veteran of two tours in Afghanistan and she has the psychological damage to prove it. She's a bit of a redneck, to boot. Here we have a neat reversal on the old cop/young cop partnership cliché, with the young woman being the grizzled veteran, the older man inexperienced in violence. He does learn, of course. Another reversal of sorts occurs with the scientist who kicks off the contagion in the first place. Typical of zombie stories is the conflict between unbelieving science and voodoo magic, with reason having to yield to superstition. But here it is the scientist who has created the zombie menace, not, as is usual, out of a mad desire for power or from the pursuit of knowledge beyond safe limits. Our scientist simply wants the simple satisfaction of making one evil person suffer in revenge for the harm done his family. But the punishment he devises is so horrific that it makes the zombies themselves pale by comparison. Is it possible that the understandable human desire for retaliation for immense harm done can lead to the potential destruction of life in the United States, or at least Pennsylvania? So into what is often a mindless kind of horror story, Maberry manages to introduce some inventive ideas. He leavens the gothic horror with some sly humour, particularly in the place names that introduce each very short chapter. Doc Hartnup's funeral parlour is named "Hartnup's Transition Estate," and pipes Enya in on a tape loop. Dez lives in a sleazy trailer park called Sweet Paradise, and one of the streets leading to Hartnup's is "Doll Factory Road." But the real strength of DEAD OF NIGHT lies in its main characters, Dez, TJ, and the newsmen Trout and Goat. They are in great danger and we do want them to survive. This is not to suggest that the novel is lacking in the requisite gore and horror. It has enough, but happily not too much, of that. Just enough to make us fear for the fates of the protagonists and, of course, of humanity itself. § Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, October 2011
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