Feed

Speaking of my zombie book...

I was a pretty big fan of it. Feed by Mira Grant turned out to be a rollicking little read. It opens decades after the zombie apocalypse, which killed a third of the world's population and greatly lessened the power of traditional news outlets. Of course, bloggers were the only people telling the truth about the zombies and have now become the de-facto trustworthy news for everyone under 40 and many people older than that.

I do not mean to suggest that this book is great literature, but I do think there is something to be said for well-written fun suspense that actually has an animating (that's about as punny as I get) theme that holds together throughout the book. Though it isn't exactly a stretch to figure out who the big villain is going to be (and it is a quite weakly drawn character), I like a good conspiracy book and Grant does a decent job of spooling out the story so that it has a few twists.

SPOILER ALERT

One note, indicative of my OCD when it comes to world building, I was a little annoyed by the set up for different blogger classes. This was especially true for Fictionals. Grant's creation story for her particular world doesn't touch on the publishing industry at all and the idea of long-form episodic storytelling as the sudden province of blogs didn't make much sense to me. Have all music and television also suddenly disappeared in the wake of zombies so that we now all read crappy epic poetry? Maybe, who knows, but it isn't touched on at all. This would be less of an offense if the book's investment in it didn't seem to arise from a interest in having one particular character be that strangest of all creatures, a hot flaky poetry writer who was also the biggest tech wiz. I though her entire character and the explanations for it were, by far, the least strong portions of the book.