Everyone loves a good zombie story; it’s basically human nature. It seems that there is some type of subconscious desire to experience and understand what happens when humanity loses itself and becomes animalistic and base. Coinciding with this is the desire to see people overcome their baseness, their personal zombies. But what happens when zombies aren’t the biggest problem? In the novel Feed, author Mira Grant takes a graphic and hard look at life after a zombie apocalypse, where zombies are merely a part of the background and not the focal point of the story.
The plot recounts the story of two siblings George (her actual name is Georgia) and Shaun Mason. Along with their friend Buffy (whose real name is also Georgia), they make up the staff of the blogging site The End Times. In this post-apocalyptic world, bloggers have effectively replaced traditional news programs as the most reliable form of communication regarding everything, and especially all things zombie. The story opens with their learning that they have been chosen to cover the run of Senator Ryman as he bids for the Republican ticket in the presidential election.
The campaign quickly becomes ill-fated. Zombies are frequently used as biochemical weapons against the members of Senator Ryman’s campaign trail and, what began as a simple assignment covering the run of a presidential candidate becomes much more. The journalists quickly become entrenched in political scheming and subterfuge that could take their lives.
The zombies in this story are merely parts of the scenery. The story, in may ways, is about the zombies and their creation and repercussions of said creation — they were created when the cure for cancer and the cure for the common cold met and got pissed off inside mammals. However the focal point is never on the zombies, rather the humans. This is what sets Grant’s book apart from many other zombie books. The book isn’t about surviving the zombie apocalypse. The apocalypse has already been survived; it’s now about surviving life afterwards.
Feed is a fantastic book that will make you run a whole gamut of emotions. I strongly recommend that you go purchase it and hunker down for a great read. From the mystery surrounding the zombie attacks plaguing the political trail to the general badassery of the protagonists, it’s a book that’s hard to put down.
Make sure you check back next week when I talk about the sequel Deadline.
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