The zombie apocalypse has already taken place, and now the rest of the world is trying to deal with the fallout. Thousands of the dead have risen, and every month thousands more crawl out of their graves. Shambling, mostly mindless and completely harmless, the risen dead still need food and shelter, straining the world’s economy as countries are burdened with more and more mouths to feed. And anyone who tries to kill a Second Lifer (the PC term) is killed horribly by a force as mysterious as the one that reanimates the dead in the first place.
Sounds like a pretty fascinating idea for a book, doesn’t it? Well too bad, because all of that is just background noise to a completely different story. Lesser Creatures tells us of a doomed love drawn out by a magical power that’s annoyingly unexplained. The main character is a bored advertising executive who comes across as instantly unlikable, and yet who we’re supposed to sympathize with for most of the book. Eric Cooper jumps from a near mid-life crisis to a kind of reawakening, followed by a shock that makes him almost hit rock bottom, just before he and his mother rediscover their compassion for Eric’s deceased father in time for Eric to bond with a zombie-who’s-more-than-a-zombie for reasons that are never clarified. There’s also a two-dimensional scheming CEO and a priest who’s operating under the best intentions but who may be completely unhinged. Other than the very beginning, the very ending, and a couple of bit parts, the risen dead are no more of an element here than a bad thunderstorm taking place in another city. There were times when I wanted to shake the characters and yell, “Damn you, what did you do with my zombie story?!”
And that’s a shame, because the first few chapters looked like they were leading up to a really good book. The prologue with the teenage lovers meeting in a graveyard was entertainingly like the set-up to a thousand zombie flicks, but with a twist that hints at a new power to be explained later. The hint is all you get though; it’s never made clear why one of the characters has a mysterious power to grant wishes. And their reason for turning the zombie apocalypse into a religion ends up being a byzantine maze of psychosis and obsession, with a heaping dose of overly complicated plotting.
The zombies themselves and their effect on society also looked pretty intriguing, but they don’t hold up under a lot of scrutiny. The existence of the Curse – the force that causes anyone who kills a zombie to literally rot to death in the space of minutes – was a very handy way to make sure society has to deal with the zombies instead of sending in the army with flame throwers or just herding the walking corpses into an incinerator. But…it doesn’t explain why the zombies have to be fed. Sure, some people feel protective towards the walking corpses that used to be their family members or friends, but only the most delusional think that there’s anything inside the Second Lifer’s rotting brains that remembers their first life or has any thoughts at all. Having all of the Second Lifers take a daily decontamination bath in order to get credits for food and whiskey is interesting, but then it’s explained later in the book that Second Lifers only “live” for about five years before their body decomposes. Do they “die” for real then? Would they “die” faster if they weren’t being given food or shelter, and would simply corralling all of them in pens until nature takes its course somehow spread the Curse to everyone responsible for building the pens? It’s never really explained.
The characters are all over the place. I could occasionally sympathize with them; I almost cheered when Eric Cooper dumps his shrill hateful girlfriend, and the situation he’s put into a few chapters later would make almost anyone crawl into a bottle. But it’s never quite believable that Eric would have stayed with the girlfriend in the first place, and the whole storyline about his late father doesn’t feel like it has any bearing on the rest of the story. Likewise, the murder of a secondary character by having her eyes gouged out is excused because the perpetrator was “only a creature of instinct.” But somehow being an unthinking killer didn’t stop them from observing and remembering everything that went on, letting them jump to conclusions later that left me dizzy and leading to a reconciliation with Eric that gave me whiplash. It was just too convenient, as was the connection between two entirely unrelated Second Lifers that supposedly drove the entire plot.
And then the ending. Oh dear, the ending. Most cliched single-line ending ever. It leaves open the possibility for a sequel, but set in a world that’s more like your average zombie apocalypse than the one Giglio created at the start of the book.
And that’s just disappointing, because I thought this was a unique idea for a zombie apocalypse. There were a couple of nicely chilling moments as well – a supposedly lifeless zombie suddenly blinking, a church covered with crows – and a very frightening reveal that would give the world some real problems once some very dangerous information gets out. The effect of a huge population of the dead on technological advances, the decrease in violent crime when your victim could just come back, even the idea of companies trying to use advertising targeted at Second Lifers, there was so much of this world that could be explored. Unfortunately it was a little like a clockmaker crafting a beautiful watch and then using it to brace a wobbly table leg. The author just sort of ignored the most interesting parts of the world he created in order to tell a story that wasn’t all that interesting, and if he ran into anything he didn’t want to take the time to explain he just said, “magic”, and then moved on. It’s possible that I didn’t pick the right Peter Giglio book to start with, since his books are consistently highly-rated on amazon and goodreads, but I’m going to have to get some input from readers before I try any more.