I read the ‘Newsflesh’ trilogy by Mira Grant (a pen name for Seanan McGuire) on the recommendation of a friend. The three books are Feed, Deadline, and Blackout.
The basic premise of the series is that the human race has cured cancer and the common cold, but in doing so, accidentally created a virus – called Kellis-Amberlee – that turns people who die into flesh eating zombies. 15 years after ‘The Rising,’ the name of the era when the zombies first appeared and nearly wiped out the human race, Georgia and Shaun Mason run a news website and are selected to cover the United States presidential campaign of Senator Peter Ryman.
I liked this trilogy. A lot. It’s sci-fi and horror and a political thriller all wrapped into one delicious ball of page-turning goodness. But the author lost me a bit towards the last 150 pages of the third book. I’ll get to it. Hold on.
This post contains some spoilers – nothing too major, but spoilers none-the-less, so consider this your heads up!
Feed, the first book, was by far the best book in the series, although the latter two weren’t bad. Feed was narrated by Georgia, who is much more interesting and insightful than her twin brother, Shaun, who narrates the second and part of the third.
The larger mystery about the Kellis-Amberlee virus is captivating. The virus itself is captivating. McGuire really knows her stuff about pathology and sociology and history. The world building in this series is also incredible. I liked all the imagined tech and dystopia, and the continual shooting of zombies was also fun.
I liked the way McGuire used blog entries (written by the characters) to expose the characters innermost thoughts, particularly of the characters we didn’t get inside the heads of…so anyone who wasn’t Georgia and Shaun.
And I loved the way McGuire used Georgia to critique the current day news media. Georgia herself is a character to love: she is tough – rough around the edges – smart, and obsessed with the truth. In fact, it is Georgia who has given me a real motto to live by, especially when I write:
“Tell the truth as you see it and let everyone else decide if they believe it or not.”
…or at least that’s the gist of it. I can’t find the bloody quote now that I’m actually looking for it.
Anyway, I enjoyed just about everything about this series except for a few things: the end of the story happened too abruptly. Blackout was like, 600 pages, and the wrap up was maybe 10? Not what I wanted.
Second, and this is where the story kind of lost me: the relationship between Georgia and Shaun was too convenient. It gave Georgia something that had never been published, yes, but this relationship had been going on for how long? Nearly ten years? So this relationship had been going on as long as they said, and we’ve been inside their heads for 1000+ pages, and they’ve never acknowledged this relationship? Not even in their own thoughts? Come on.
Plus, even though they’re only adopted twins and not actually related, I found this more incestuous than I like to get in my stories. I really hate incest as a plot point.
Finally, the last 150 pages or so of Blackout feature a bizarre scene at the home of a male computer genius who seems to keep emotionally damaged girls to do his bidding. He’s clearly emotionally abusive and manipulative, and the girls he’s got with him are both clearly a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic, but the whole series of events at the house is confusing. I had to read the episode three times and I’m still not sure I fully understand what happened.
The editor really could have cut this “mad scientist’s mad apprentices gone extra mad” scene and nobody would have been sorrier for it. It felt like a very contrived way to get the good guys into a confrontation with the bad guys.
Anyway, yes, the last 150 or so pages of Blackout were not up to par with the rest of the series, but the series itself was still good. I think the last dystopian future alternate universe novel I read was Mockingjay (the conclusion of ‘The Hunger Games’ trilogy) by Suzanne Collins, and that book paled in comparison to Blackout. Plus, Georgia Mason’s character at the end of Blackout was much better than what Katniss had become by the end of Mockingjay.
Overall, I highly recommend the Newsflesh trilogy. It’s smarter than a lot of books featuring supernatural creatures, but the beauty of it is that it’s so much more than a zombie book. Most zombie books are 200 pages tops, but this is a thriller trilogy that goes on for 1000+ pages. The science is obviously pseudo-science, but it’s very convincing pseudo-science, and there is clearly a lot of background research that has gone into this story. It’s not just virus pathology science either, there’s tech research in there, research about government agencies and how they operate, etc…
It all becomes a very well built alternate universe that features all the action you’d expect in the post zombie apocalypse, but what makes it a page turner is the mystery and political intrigue. It’s also the sheer drive of Georgia Mason and her tireless quest for the truth that really makes this series so worthwhile.
She’s really the great triumph of the trilogy because she reveals the human condition: at the end of the day, the truth really does set us free.
words in scarlet ink 