Regular visitors to my site will know that now and then I’ll blog about a book, magazine or author that I’ve read and enjoyed. Some of those in the past have been people like, Neal Asher, Joe Abercrombie, Interzone, and Black Static etc. Now I have another book to recommend, it’s ‘Feed’ by Mira Grant and is basically a ‘zombie book’ but an interesting one and, as I’ve been writing a few zombie stories myself (I’m in the new zombie anthology Holiday of the Dead, with the great John Russo, co-writer of Night of The Living Dead) quite appropriate.
Feed is set around the year 2040 where everyone will ultimately become a zombie when they die, whether you’ve been bitten or not the virus is in your body and will mutate you upon your death and you will re-animate. This has to be the best and most convincing way to explain how zombies can exist that I’ve read so far. In 2014 two cures were found. The first was a cure for cancer; the second was for the common cold. However the combination of the two cures succeeded in making the human body hard to kill, in fact it resurrected it after death and gave it the urge to... feed.
The other thing I enjoyed in the book was the way blogging has become the top-of-the-food-chain method of reporting the news and the two heroes in the book, brother and sister, Shaun and Georgia are at the pinnacle of that food chain, but whilst reporting on an up-and-coming senator who is hoping to be the new president of the USA they unknowingly put themselves in harm’s way upon discovering the truth about the zombie outbreak. One little quibble I have though is that the bad guy in the story is easily discovered, but... this could be a trick on the author’s part as Feed is just the first book in a trilogy and I’m sure there are certainly more villains to be discovered.
