Seanan McGuire (writing as Mira Grant)
2011
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – –
BEWARE… SPOILER ALERT FOR
FEED
Deadline,
the second book in Grant’s zombie-apocalypse
Newsflesh trilogy, picks
up the story about a year after where the first book,
Feed, left off. It
is 2041; Senator Peter Ryman has gone on to be president of the United
States; and Shaun Mason is running the After the End Times online news
agency by himself, following the assassination of his sister Georgia by former vice presidential candidate David Tate.
Like
Feed, this novel opens with a gripping action
scene. In this one,
Shaun has to rescue his most seasoned reporter and a trainee out on his
first field test from a sea of about thirty zombies.
The
difference this time is that Shaun’s heart is no longer really in it. His sister's death has filled him with a profound loneliness. He has
gone a little bit crazy, conducting frequent, extremely realistic
two-way conversations with Georgia in his head. And he worries that,
without her, maybe there’s no longer any point to any of what he
does. To avoid endangering his staff with his distractedness and lack of
enthusiasm, he has even taken himself out of the field work he was so good at before.
But, sure enough, something happens to
suck him back in. At his office in Oakland, he gets a visit from Kelly
Connolly, a CDC doctor who has faked her own death and escaped from her
employers so that she could get to Shaun and have him expose a sinister
conspiracy that she has discovered. And this conspiracy is related to
Georgia’s untimely death, which is the only reason Shaun takes the case.
Dr.
Connolly’s discovery is that people like Georgia, who have non-lethal
“reservoir conditions” associated with the Kimberlee zombie virus, are
dying of seemingly accidental causes at much higher rates than the
average population. And anyone who notices this trend and tries to
research it, or even bring it up to their superiors at
the CDC, winds up dead themselves.
Not coincidentally,
just as Dr. Connolly is revealing her discovery to the After the End Times
staff, the entire city of Oakland is massively bombed by the U.S.
military, which excuses the action by claiming it is trying to stop a zombie outbreak. Shaun, Dr. Connolly, and several of Shaun’s reporters
barely escape to rural California with their lives.
They are then almost
constantly on the run for the rest of the book. They visit rogue
scientists unaffiliated with the CDC to have them look at Dr. Connolly’s
data; they go to a branch CDC office in Portland to ask them about the
results; and inevitably they wind up going to CDC
headquarters in Memphis to confront the director. Everywhere they go, they are held
at gunpoint, threatened, shot at, or “accidentally” shut into buildings
with hordes of zombies. And after they finally get out of Memphis and
head home to tell the world what they know, they have to survive a
cross-country drive back to California during the middle of the largest
zombie outbreak in recorded history.
Deadline is set in exactly
the same world as
Feed, has many of the same characters, and is
similarly filled with near-constant action and suspense. But it is
nowhere near as compelling a story.
For one thing, the characters
aren’t as interesting. Grant killed off three of the best characters in
Feed—two good and one bad—leaving us mainly with second-stringers in
this second book. I wasn’t really attached to any of them, so when they
are in danger or even die, there wasn't nearly as much of an emotional
pull. The news agency staffers’ styles are not very differentiated, so
most of their blog excerpts sound very similar to each other. And there
are two short-lived romantic entanglements thrown in which serve only as
pointless distractions rather than plot- or character-enriching experiences.
For
another thing, the chief villain’s master plan is, well, weak. It’s a
tremendous anticlimax when we learn what it is. It’s hard to believe
that even
he believes in his goals enough to kill for them.
The
medical discussions and explanations—of which there are many in this book—are
abstract and confusing. It’s hard to build up enough horror or suspense
about substrains, reservoirs, chimera, and immunology when the
explanations of them are so muddy. Grant said that while writing
Deadline she got a lot of advice from real scientists and doctors about
how to talk about virology, and it almost seems like maybe that was a
mistake.
I also became irritated with Grant’s technique of having
the characters realize something before we (the reader) do—usually
because we don’t know all the information they know—and then excruciatingly slowly
drawing out the reveal of what they know as a way to amp up the
dramatic tension. One conversation in which Shaun
knew perfectly well what Dr. Connolly was avoiding saying went on for
three pages while he tried to get
her to say it instead of just
explaining it himself and moving on. It was filled with dialogue like
this:
“I’m going to ask you one question, Doc, and I want
you to think really hard about your answer, because you’re legally dead,
and if we want to hand you to this nice lady,” I gestured toward Dr.
Abbey, “for her experiments, well, there’s really not much you can do
about it. Don’t lie to me. Understand?”
Kelly nodded mutely.
“Good. I’m glad to see that we have an agreement. Now tell me: The
reservoir conditions. What do they do? What do they really do?”
And then she wouldn't answer, and he'd try another tack. I think you should either
have the characters tell us what they have figured out, or don’t tell
us, but don’t tell us over and over that they’ve figured out something,
and then make them go pale or have their eyes widen with horror, and
then act all cagey about it for several pages. It doesn’t make it more
suspenseful; it makes it annoying.
And Shaun, our lone remaining
hero from
Feed, who I really wanted to pin my faith on, is revealed to
have a
serious anger management problem. When he is stressed out,
or anxious, or mad, he handles it by being nasty to underlings, slamming
cell phones, punching walls, and shoving computer equipment. Once, in
the past, he actually punched one of his employees in the face. It made
me miss Georgia’s rational, steadying influence quite a bit.
And, finally,
speaking of Georgia’s steadying influence: Shaun’s conversations with
Georgia’s ghost do bring her back into the book a little and do mitigate
his personality problems somewhat. But Shaun consistently interrupts the
nice flow of those conversations by commenting on just how whacked out
everyone must be by him talking to his dead sister. To wit:
Don’t be so hard on yourself, said George. You’re tired.
“That’s easy for you to say,” I snapped, before I could stop myself.
Then I froze, casting a careful glance toward Maggie. I was expecting… I
don’t know what I was expecting. I get a lot of reactions to the fact
that I still talk to my sister. Most of them aren’t good ones.
My eyes were normal until I was almost at the amplification
threshold, said George thoughtfully. The retinal distortion didn’t kick
in until then.
“I know,” I mumbled, keeping my voice low, so as to hopefully avoid reminding my team that I was crazy.
Commenting
on it a couple times, early on, to show how people are reacting to his
craziness, would be fine. But when every single time he talks to Georgia he
also has to make some mention of how someone rolls their eyes or looks
at him funny, or how he mumbles because he doesn’t want people to hear
him, it distracts from these often crucial conversations and makes them
herky-jerky. I'd rather just hear what Georgia's ghost has to say.
Anyway... while reading
Deadline, I really thought I was going to be done with the
Newsflesh
trilogy. But then, of course, Grant added a twist—or actually
two twists—at the end of this book that
still made me want to read the next one. So forget
everything I just said, and let’s go read
Blackout.
