Book Review: Boneshaker

Cherie Priest

2009

Awards: Locus

Nominations: Nebula, Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

SPOILER ALERT

I am terrified of zombies. They are far more scary to me than anything else. I can handle (and enjoy) quite a lot of vampire, werewolf, or mega-monster horror. But when a story has zombies in it, it often tends to be too much for me.

So when the cover of this book said that it was going to be a “steampunk-zombie-airship adventure of rollicking pace and sweeping proportions,” I readied myself to be really scared.

The book takes place in Seattle in 1879. Priest alters history quite a bit to fit her story, which is fine, but it does mean that you have to accept that it’s not going to be an exactly historically accurate 1879 Seattle. The Civil War is still going on, for example; the Alaskan gold rush happened many years later than it really did; and Seattle’s population is about eight times larger than it really was at the time.

The prelude for the events in the book is this: in 1863, sixteen years before the story really starts, Russia held a competition to see who could invent a machine to let them mine their Klondike gold the fastest. A brilliant and somewhat crazy Seattle inventor, Leviticus Blue, won the competition with his design for “Dr. Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine.” The Russians pressured him to get it operational too soon, however, and on its first road test it went horribly out of control, destroying most of the financial district of downtown Seattle.

Not only did the Boneshaker’s rampage itself kill many people, but the machine also dug so deep that it opened up a subterranean vent of a hideous, heavy, toxic gas. The gas, which quickly became known as “the Blight,” poured out of the vent, killing almost everyone left in the downtown area. And then the Blight turned out to have an even lovelier side effect: it turned a large proportion of the recently dead people into “rotters,” or zombies, who of course had an insatiable appetite for living human flesh.

The survivors immediately threw up a wall around the downtown area to contain the zombies and the still-spewing Blight, and to protect the people who still eked out a meager living in the impoverished “Outskirts” neighborhoods right next to the city. 

No one knew what happened to Leviticus Blue after the accident. But his pregnant wife, Briar, escaped the city, and she raised their son, Zeke, alone in near poverty in the Outskirts for the next fifteen years.

The main story of Boneshaker is set in motion when Zeke, at fifteen years old, decides he wants to go to his parents’ old house in the walled city to try to find evidence to prove his father’s innocence. He packs a lantern, a gas mask, and Blight-seeing polarized goggles; leaves his mother a note; and sneaks into the city through a half-buried outflow pipe for what he thinks will be a quick day trip.

Whereupon, of course, there is a major earthquake, and it collapses the pipe, Zeke’s only known route of escape. His mother panics and goes in after him.

What follows is a romping chase (at a “rollicking pace,” as advertised) as Zeke tries to find the old house and Briar tries to find Zeke and both try to avoid the ravenous zombies, the ever-present Blight, and living humans who might do them harm. For, as it turns out, there are still plenty of people living in the city. They have sealed up buildings with wax and tar so the Blight can’t get in, and they pull in clean air with a system of bellows and pipes coming over the wall. They are well-masked and well-armed and they travel mostly through underground tunnels and roof-to-roof catwalks. And they’re not all nice.

There is also a small population of black marketeers who swoop in over the city in zeppelins, collect bags of the Blight gas, and turn it into a highly dangerous drug used by addicts on the outside. These illegal airships turn out to be very helpful to both Briar and Zeke more than once.

There is not much in the way of actual plot complexity in this book. What there is is a lot of breathless up-and-down rushing through basements, streets, and catwalks as mother and son try to find what they respectively came for and get out alive. They run into dangerous people and people who are kindhearted, and of course they run into zombies. And they gradually get closer and closer to a rendezvous with the mysterious, tyrannical Dr. Minnericht, an eccentric recluse who holds the citizens of walled Seattle in thrall with their dependence on his brilliant anti-zombie inventions, and who may or may not be Briar’s long-lost husband Leviticus.

I liked the premise and I liked the mid-19^th century steampunk aesthetic, which is manifested primarily in the quirky mechanical inventions and the characters’ names. Many of the characters are charismatic and appealing, like the mechanical-one-armed crossbow-toting bar-mistress Lucy O’Gunning, and the stoic, heavily armed zombie-fighting warrior Jeremiah Swakhammer. And much of the time it is a lively, page-turning ride.

But at the same time, the book has a lack of depth and direction that is frustrating. The challenges that Briar and Zeke face hardly ever seem to be as difficult to conquer as I thought they would be. There are too many times when fortuitous accidents land one of the other of them where they need to be just at the time they need to be there, and other times when they are fortuitously rescued by someone showing up out of the blue or a fortuitous piece of just the right type of equipment showing up in their hands at just the right time. And the sinister Dr. Minnericht turns out not to be pretty anticlimactic; he's not as much of a satisfying twist as I thought he was going to be.

I also have to say that the zombies were--dare I say it?--disappointingly non-frightening. Most of the trouble Briar and Zeke had was actually with living people, not the dead ones. And when they did encounter zombies, it was usually in the form of sudden, action-packed, almost silly scuffles with large crowds of them, and the battles were too frantic and over too quickly to be really frightening. Zombies are known not for their agility and fighting ability but for their mindless, unrelenting, predatory pursuit, and using a few of them in quieter, more suspenseful situations might have made them far more terrifying. There were occasionally times when I’d be scared by someone hearing a suggestive moan or a sliding shuffle down a dark tunnel, but not very often, and it usually didn't amount to anything.