The Year in Reading: 2023

As we approach the new year, I feel like it’s customary to look back and castigate ourselves on not learning French or how to knit or whatever, and promise to do better next year. I probably will never learn French or how to knit, but I will likely continue to read a lot. There isn’t any particular theme to my reading, but there can be clusters of interest. As always, there’s a disproportionate number of books which are zombie or zombie-adjacent narratives. I also seemed to gravitate to lighter Star Trek/Wars-y space opera this year. And if last year was the Year of Seanan McGuire, this year was The Year of Martha Wells, which kind of crept up on me. She was guest at Minicon, so I started reading her stuff to get more out of her panels, and then just never stopped. I also feel like I did more audio this year, although maybe it just feels like it because of the commute.

So here’s an incomplete summary of what I’ve read this year.

Zombruary: February was given over to reading zombie books, like usual, but then of course I read a bunch more as the year went on. 

  • Devils Wake by Tananarive Due and Stephen Barnes. A bunch of juvenile delinquents try to ride out the zombie apocalypse in a summer camp outside of Seattle. Excellent dialogue and a well-rounded cast elevate a familiar early outbreak narrative, plus mushrooms are going to kill us all. I never read the sequel, but maybe this Zombruary. 
  • Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton. Also set in the PNW, this zombie outbreak is narrated by a pet crow, which sounded delightfully strange. It has potential, but bogs down horribly in the middle with a lot of flashy, overwritten prose which doesn’t do anything, and I’m still mad about the death of that one character. 
  • Last Ones Left Alive by Sarah Davis-Goff. I’d read this before and enjoyed it, but then also really didn’t understand what happened at the end. I’ve always said zombie stories are especially attuned to location – at least as much as mysteries, if not moreso – and Last Ones Left Alive is very, very Irish. Orpen is raised off of the West coast of Ireland on an island free of the skrake; she has to go to the mainland once her mother is killed and her other mom bitten. I still don’t know what happened at the end, but at least the sequel came out this year so that might answer that. 
  • Handling the Undead by John Ajvide Lindquist. Lindquist burst onto the scene with his take on vampires in Let Me In; here he tackles the reanimated dead. There’s a lot of nice stuff in here about how the return of loved ones would disrupt the grieving process and complicate the relief of death, and several sequences that gave me the screaming fantods – the bath, that eel – but the novel unfortunately falls apart in the end. 
  • Eat Brains Love by Jeff Hart. Rompy YA novel with two pov characters: a just-turned zombie – the kind that look totally normal if they keep eating people – and a teenaged psychic who is part of a government team that puts down zombie outbreaks. The sort of Sleepless in Seattle-style romantic subplot did not work, but otherwise the plot zips along with enough action and humor to keep you from nitpicking. 
  • Zombruary was over when I listened to Zone One by Colson Whitehead again. Boy, but I love that novel, which is weird, because it’s aggressively literary and absolutely unconcerned with genre, if you take my meaning. A depressed guy moves to New York, like he always dreamed of doing, and it doesn’t help the depression one bit. With zombies. 
  • Everything Dies by TW Malpass. Complete opposite of Zone One: totally pulpy and genre-bound to a fault. It’s fine, but I am absolutely sick to death of cartoon bad guys threatening sexual assault to prove the situation is serious. 
  • The Rise of the Governor by Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga. Remember that thing I just said about sexual assault? Well, strap the fuck in. Maybe, maybe this could have worked if it was a portrait of Phillip Blake — aka The Governor, early antagonist to Rick Grimes and the Rickocrats — largely through the lens of his younger, bullied brother, Brian. But then, plot twist! Brian takes Phillip’s name at the end, after his brother finally, deservedly gets his head blown off. This means I’ve read through several hundred pages of some asshole raping and murdering his way through the zombie apocalypse, only to have an eleventh hour protagonist switch which gives me zero insight as to how Brian turns into the Governor. I mean, I think I’m supposed to postulate some sort of dissociative PTSD-induced DID, but that’s fucking stupid and not how any of this works. Ugh.
  • The Investigation by Stanislaw Lem. Corpses of the newly dead start getting up and walking out into the snow; after an interval of less than a day, they fall down dead again. Set in 1950s England, The Investigation is something like a satire of the police procedural crossed with a Gothic novel, and as those are almost completely antithetical genres, it’s occasionally brilliant but often confusing. (The time displacement is a thing too; it’s been 65 years since this novel was written, and I found a lot of the social mores perplexing.) It’s still Lem though, so funny in a desert dry way and brisk enough to tug me along to the end, even if I didn’t always get what was going on. 
  • Empire of the Dead by George A Romero. No one told me Romero wrote comics! Y’all are on notice. Set loosely in the “…of the Dead” universe, Empire of the Dead asks, but what if vampires too? This leads inevitably to existential questions re: the various kinds of undeath, some of which are dealt with hilariously. It is set in a very stupid classic dystopia tho, which I did not enjoy. 

Various Series..es I Continued or Reread: I feel like I have an escalating number of series that I either haven’t finished or the author is still putting out installments, which isn’t helped at all by the fact that I have a tendency to wander away about two books into any given trilogy. 

  • Wolfhound Empire by Peter Higgins. I read the first installment, Wolfhound Century, a dozen years ago when it came out, but then never followed up. I listened to that and the sequel, Truth & Fear, to and from work, and then discovered, to my eternal irritation, that the final installment was never read out as audio. Really cool steampunky alt-historical take on the Soviet Union, with a side of eldritch horror. I guess I’ll have to read the third.
  • I also listened to the entire Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer — Annihilation, Authority and Acceptance — which is an excellent audio. (Bronson Pynchot is a stupid good narrator; who knew?) I find that entire series incredibly disquieting, especially the second, and as I said before, mushrooms are going to kill us all. 
  • Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovich. Urban fantasy set in London with a local historian’s eye towards London history. Really fun, with a cosmopolitan mix sometimes absent from urban fantasy, perversely. My one complaint is the inherent copaganda of a series with a Met copper as the lead, and in reality, the Met police are fucking awful. Managed to get to book two, Moon Over Soho, before I wandered off, but I’m sure I’ll get back to it. 
  • Galactic Bonds by Jennifer Estep. The first and second of this series, Only Bad Options and Only Good Enemies bracketed the year. Not great! Romance-y space opera set in one of those feudal nightmares one can find in a certain kind of scifi. But I have a thing about mate-bonds and how terrible they are, and this series deals head on with how terrible they are, so. Shrug emoticon. 
  • Class 5 series by Michelle Diener: Dark Horse, Dark Deeds, Dark Minds, &c. Compulsively read all five of the books in this series in like a minute. They all involve humans abducted and thrown into real Star Trek-y galactic politics. They remind me of Bujold’s Cordelia books, the way they have great escalating stakes for our principles to clever their way out of. Bujold’s probably crunchier, whatever that means. 
  • Our Lady of Endless Worlds by Lina Rather. I liked the first of this series, Sisters of the Vast Black, better than the second, Sisters of the Forsaken Stars. The overt plot felt a little careworn: I have seen a lot of arrogant, dying empires commit atrocities in pursuit of recapturing their dominion, and might even be said to live in one. But I am a sucker for nifty space stuff, and a group of nuns living on a living spaceship and debating whether to let their living ship go off and mate like it wants to is major nifty space stuff. 
  • Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse by Jim C. Hines. I read the first two a million years ago when I was writing for B&N, and then kinda forgot about the series. Finally finished the series with Terminal Peace. Hines lost his wife to cancer between writing book two and three, and the tonal shift is apparent: For a comedy, this has a strong current of grief. I didn’t mind, as this series has always had more serious themes underneath all the exploding space toilets. I also have big hearts for eyes for working class heroes, and our post-apocalyptic janitors get really inventive with cleaning products. 
  • Earthsea by Ursula K LeGuin. Reread both A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan. Much as I adore A Wizard of Earthsea, the way it dispatches with the monomyth in a tight 200 pages, I was struck by how quietly, perfectly subversive Atuan is. Gah, I just love it all so much. 
  • Longshadow by Olivia Atwater. The third (and maybe final?) book in the Regency Fairy Tales series, I didn’t love this one as much as the first two, Half a Soul and Ten Thousand Stitches. Gaslamp fantasy in an alt-Regency setting, not dissimilar from Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown, but interrogating class & disability more than race. 
  • Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison. Sort of an adjacent series to The Goblin Emperor, Cemeteries of Amalo is something like a police procedural without the police, but with lots of fun bureaucracy and the occasional ghoul attack. The main character is profoundly grieving, which you don’t figure out for a while, and colors all of his interactions with both the living and the dead. Really fine. 
  • Resonance Surge by Nalini Singh. Yup, still on my Psy-Changeling bullshit. I reread the previous two, Last Guard and Storm Echo, to try to figure out what was up with the whole Scarab situation, but then I realized I didn’t care. Last Guard is the best of the Psy-Changeling Trinity books to date, imao.
  • Murderbot Chronicles by Martha Wells. I’d read them all before, but me and the fam listened to the first six novel/las in this series during long car rides over the year, culminating in the most recent, System Collapse. I just love Murderbot’s bellyaching about how it just wants to get back to its stories. Hard same, Murderbot. 
  • The Fall of Ile-Rien by Martha Wells. Another series undertaken on the commute to and from work, for the most part. Completely odd series, because while I never felt like I was having my socks blown off or anything during books one & two, The Wizard Hunters and The Ships of Air, but by the time I got to book three, The Gate of The Gods, I was completely invested, and spent more time than I should admit to sitting in the garage after the drive home absolutely freaking out by some upset in the book. Kind of steampunk and sort of gaslamp fantasy, the Edwardian English-ish country of Ile-Rien has been losing badly to a mysterious people they call the Gardier. Honestly, the whole thing is so complicated I couldn’t possibly sum it succinctly. As a clash of empires story, it’s notably grounded in personal perspectives, and never loses sight of how trauma and grief work on both societal and individual levels. 

Graphic: I didn’t read a lot of comics/graphic stuff this year. I started maybe a half dozen things, but nothing I wanted to read past the first installment. I feel like I used to have better recommendations on what series to check out, though idk what that was or where it went. Oh well. 

  • All the Simon Stålenhag. I completely lost my shit over Stålenhag’s loose trilogy, Tales from the Loop, Things from the Flood, and The Electric State. The first two are a sort of oral history from the children who grew up around the Loop, a CERN-like installation in rural Sweden, in the 80s and 90s. The third goes to America and gets a fuck of a lot darker. I just cannot get over the weird mix of credulity and incredulity that one finds in the adult recount of childhood. Plus there’s this line from the movie Nope that I keep coming back to: what do you call a bad miracle? Because each installment, and increasingly, are characterized by bad nostalgia, which like a bad miracle seems a contradiction in terms. Nostalgia is memory without shame. Completely gutting. (The Labyrinth will also fuck you up.) 
  • No 6 by Atsuka Asano. I’ve been very slowly working my way through this yaoi manga set in a classic dystopia. It’s not amazing, but I’m ride or die for Dogkeeper. 

Gothic/Horror/Supernatural: The pandemic kind of messed me up there for a couple years, and I was unable to find much joy in the macabre. But I’m back, baby! Not all of the following books are strictly horror, but they’re all weird in their own way. 

  • American Elsewhere by Robert Jackson Bennett. I’m very susceptible to horror which takes place in the Uncanny Valley — and if that town nestled in that vale is set dressed in mid-century modern trappings, more’s the better. Mona inherits a house in a town called Wink from her long dead mother. Wink is something like Los Alamos, a town created for the scientists in the facility on the mesa. What those scientists were doing was altogether as awful as the Manhattan Project, but more localized. Underneath all the squirming tentacles and mirrors which don’t reflect the rooms they are in is an intensely sad story of indifferent mothers and damaged daughters. Not my usual reaction to cosmic horror, but here we are. 
  • Amatka by Karin Tidbeck. Another book I flipped my shit over, just 100% in my wheelhouse. Something like Soviet Noir, but the mystery is the nature of reality, not a murder. I adore a science fictional bureaucracy, and the world here appears to be literally, physically made out of bureaucracy. Solaris by way of The Southern Reach, with a little bit of Wolfhound Century thrown in
  • The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw. I wasn’t in the right mood for this, but forced it, which is a shame all around. I can be on the hook for bloody, beautiful prose that is this side of overwritten (and certainly, for some, would be over the line), and what she does with The Little Mermaid is both upside down and inside out. I might reread when I know I’m in the mood. 
  • The Little Homo Sapiens Scientist by S.L. Huang. Another retelling of The Little Mermaid with a central inversion. The Little Homo Sapiens Scientist is a gut punch of a story, and gave me the kind of world that I would absolutely kill to see in a larger fiction. Highly recommended. 
  • Such Sharp Teeth by Rachel Harrison. I kind of can’t believe I’ve never seen a werewolf novel which uses lycanthropy as a metaphor for the body horror of pregnancy before. The voice is pitch perfect aging hipster millennial (and I mean that in a good way): both self assured and self loathing in equal measures, quipping, funny, allusive. And the werewolf parts are gross. That said, I don’t think the ending was altogether successful. It’s not bad, just kinda tonally off, and the revealed antagonist is disappointing. Still, it was an enjoyable read, and sometimes the getting there is worth the end. 
  • Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica. I’ve been desensitized to a certain amount of gore because of my love of zombie fiction, and even then the body horror in Tender is the Flesh was a lot. After an animal-borne pathogen leads to the eradication of everything from livestock to zoo animals to pets, cannibalism is systemized and normalized. Bazterrica is very deliberate in the linguistic distinctions between “special meat” and legally recognized people, and all of the ways those distinctions bend, break, and fail with even everyday stressors. The ending is abrupt, deliberately so, and features violations so intense I literally shuddered. Disgust is a function of both empathy and contempt. Jfc.
  • Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu. I feel like I need to make a tag called “tragic, romantic hair-brushing” for my reading. Just off the top of my head, I would tag this, the Dollenganger books, and The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter. 
  • The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe. Somehow missed this one when I read all my Poe at 16 or so. Completely bugshit; loved it.  
  • A Night in Lonesome October by Roger Zelazney. There are 31 chapters in Lonesome October to correspond with the 31 days in the month, so I did the thing where I read a chapter a day (mostly). The novel is narrated by a dog and features a cast of Gothic types – vampires, magicians, Sherlock Holmes, &c – and their animal familiars, so it’s definitely on the goofier end of Gothic fiction. Delightful and strange. 
  • The Scapegracers by HA Clarke. I want to write some quip about how The Scapegracers is like The Craft for Zoomers, but this is exactly the same kind of facile analogy as when people call Lev Grossman’s The Magicians “a grown-up Hogwarts.” It’s not just The Craft for Zoomers; it’s a witchy, queer, neurodivergent coming of age that you didn’t know you needed, but you do.

Various One-Offs: Not everything fits into a neat category! So here’s some stuff that didn’t fit anywhere else.

  • Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel. Speaking of The Magicians, I decided to read this novel because I became completely obsessed with the show adapted from it. I liked the show better, but the book has a lot going for it. Station Eleven is often (but not completely) a post-apocalyptic pastoral, of the type that Ursula K Le Guin or John Crowley or even Kim Stanley Robinson wrote in the 70s and 80s, but haven’t had much traction in our more saturnine times. 
  • Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard. Continuing the Shakespeare month I was having, I listened to an audio version of Stoppard’s first play on the way back from seeing the most recent Guthrie production of Hamlet. It’s definitely the work of a young, clever man: brilliant in places, but also completely beset by its own im/mortality in ways the works of older people never are. Weird, that. 
  • Final Night by Kell Shaw. Could also file this under “zombies,” but that’s not really accurate. Kind of an oddball mix of an alternate present based on some high fantasy fol-de-rol, and an urban fantasy set-up wherein a person has to solve her own murder, 20 years before. Not entirely successful, but then also energetic and interesting enough to keep me reading. I appreciate when people do weird shit with sometimes tired tropes. 
  • Catfishing on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer. I really, really loved the way Kritzer captured how friendships formed on the internet work, without treating them like lesser order relationships. I doubly appreciated how she captured the familiar/strangeness of meeting someone you’ve only known through a text medium. I haven’t read a lot of YA recently because it makes me feel old, but this was pitch perfect. 
  • Redshirts by John Scalzi. Honestly, this is the laziest sf book I’ve read since late period Asimov, with exactly the same ratio of casual mastery to dumbass what-the-fuckery. Fans of Scalzi’s writing will find this the kind of thing they like; the rest of us end up with a stress-response to dialogue tags, because literally every single utterance has one, something which becomes unavoidably obvious when you, say, listen to the audio. 
  • A Dead Djinn in Cairo by P. Djèlí Clark. Neat little short story set in an alt-history Egypt, one in which the world-building is a central character. I keep meaning to read the other fictions set in this world.
  • The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien. It’s been a minute since I’ve read this, long enough that some of the movie-stuff got set as book-stuff, so it was nice to course correct. It’s such a flex to spend just ages talking shit about hobbits before ever getting into the story at all, and then when you do, it’s another age of Frodo mooning about the Shire doing a lot of tragic, romantic hair-brushing (another for the tag??) Andy Serkis does a damn fine job as narrator.

Currently Reading: I’m still working on a couple things.

  • The Reformatory by Tananarive Due. Historical horror set in a reformatory in Jim Crow Florida. Due has a really beautiful prose style, which is good, because the relentless cruelty the main characters are subjected to is painful. The novel is dedicated to an uncle who didn’t make it out alive.
  • Ghosted by Amanda Quinn. A gender-switched contemporary take on Austen’s Northanger Abbey which so far is pretty cute. The main character is Hattie Tilney, whose mom is the emotionally distant headmaster of a boarding school. It’s a little over-determined — the theme is ghosts, and a lot — but I’m really digging Hattie’s barely-maintaining overachiever and her shitty, transactional friends. I’m really curious how she’s going to manage the last bit in OG Northanger, where Gen Tilney turns Catherine Morland out like an asshole.
  • Exit Ghost by Jennifer R Donohue. Another gender-flipped take on the classics, this time Hamlet. Not as far into this one, so I have less to say, but I really loved what she did with the ghost-on-the-battlements scene.

So! That, as they say, is that.

(Here’s my roundups from 2022 and 2020; 2021 was difficult.)

A Definitive Ranking of the Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin

Note: I wrote this for the B&N SciFi & Fantasy blog in 2018 and it was one of my favorite pieces I wrote for them. They’ve inexplicably taken it down, so I’m putting it back up.

I’ve long referred to Ursula K. Le Guin my literary grandmother, a polestar of my understanding of fiction, fantasy, and the world itself. When I learned of her death earlier this year, I sat down and cried. Even though she passed at the respectable age of 88, I cried long, wracking tears. She is the writer I found at that specific age when I wasn’t so young that I barnacled and burnished her fiction with the obscuring mist of nostalgia, nor was I too weary and worldly to be above young adult books like A Wizard of Earthsea. Indeed, her work has kept me from succumbing to the fallacy that I will ever be too important to read books about that terrifying time between childhood and the adult world.

If you have read an Ursula K. Le Guin novel, likely it is A Wizard of Earthsea, or perhaps The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed. But she wrote so many more books than those. She wasn’t as prolific as some science fiction and fantasy authors, but she filled a career of five decades with remarkable works that will long outlive her. Though weighing one book against another is always a personal process—and so many of Le Guin’s books are so, so personal to me—still I have endeavored below to place them in an order that makes a kind of emotional sense. It does to me, anyway. Hopefully to you too. Regardless, Le Guin’s body of work is a well that will sustain you, if you only drink from it. So drink. Drink long, and drink deep.

And so, from merely worthwhile to the most essential: a ranking of the novels of Ursula K. Le Guin.

Very Far Away From Anywhere Else
This slender young adult novel, written in 1976, doesn’t have anything wrong with it exactly, but it sure hasn’t aged well in the intervening 40-odd years. Owen Griffiths is a misunderstood teen—too smart, too weird, too short. He’s made peace with his differences, much to the chagrin and disappointment of his crushingly normal parents, and is working doggedly toward attending either Cal Tech or MIT. He’s going to get out of this town, this life, this normalcy. But he’s still a teenage boy, and when he strikes up a friendship, and then something more than friendship with his neighbor, Natalie Fields, he’s got to deal with the both completely usual and totally disordering effects of young love. Very Far Away from Anywhere Else is a very sweet novel, with some bright patches of keen observation. Unfortunately, it feels so dated now as to read like a period piece, something like the (pun so intended) menstrual belts in Are You There, God? It’s Me Margaret? but without the more relatable aspects of that novel.

Rocannon’s World
I have a fair amount of affection for this, Le Guin’s first published novel, but even I can admit it’s a mess. It was written as a postscript to the short story, “Semley’s Necklace,” which detailed and dispatched a fairly simple SFnal scenario involving both first contact and the time dilation effects of interstellar travel. After the events of “Semley’s Necklace,” the Hainish ethnologist Rocannon returns to her planet, and meets no less than four sentient species in his quest. There are flying mounts who must look like lions with wings, bestial creatures who look like angels, people who live underground like trolls, medieval-ish societies, and so, so much more packed into this short novel. Like I said, a mess. But it’s here Le Guin coined the term ansible—a device capable of instantaneous communication across the galactic void—and introduced us to the Hainish, the far-ranging culture we encounter in many of her novels. The ansible will become the lynch pin in her Hainish books, one of her broadest and most important canvasses.

City of Illusions
Another early Hainish novel, City of Illusions is the third published in that series. Its main character is a descendant of the people of Planet of Exile, but generations hence, on an Earth (or Terra, if you will) taken over and controlled by an alien protagonist called the Shing. Falk wakes up with no memories in a small, rural community of occupied Terra. Through his questing, his memories of his other self, Agad Ramarren, are recovered, and his Falk-self subsumed, until both can come to an equilibrium. Like Rocannon’s World, City of Illusions is pretty messy, with philosophy of the mind wrestling with the precepts of Taoism in a classic dystopia. The Lathe of Heaven ended up exploring these themes much more adroitly. That said, the descriptions of an earth re-growing after an apocalypse in a distant past are beautiful in their strange way, a post-apocalyptic pastoral.

The Beginning Place
The Beginning Place is another early oddment, about two young people somewhere in that liminal period between childhood and adulthood. Irene Pannis and Hugh Rogers both have small, mean lives in an unnamed American city. Both begin escaping to idyllic Tembreabrezi, a Narnian fantasy land. Irene has been coming to Tembreabrezi long enough to learn the language and culture, and initially views Hugh as an interloper. When a sickness of fear strikes the simple folk of this other land, Hugh and Irene set out together on an old-fashioned quest to kill the beast, which stands in harsh contrast with the intractable problems of their real lives; if only rent could be slain like a dragon. Sometimes people read escapist fiction because they have something to escape from. Le Guin twists escapism and realism in The Beginning Place, which is an uncomfortable thing to do.

Planet of Exile
During my research, I learned that Planet of Exile was often published together in something called the tête-bêche format with a Thomas A. Disch novel. (Now that’s something you know!) Planet of Exile follows Terran settlers on a planet called Werel. Werel has an orbital period of 60 Earth years, which means its winter lasts something like 15 of our years. (George Martin, eat your heart out.) We’re introduced to our Terran colonists at the beginning of this long winter, as they try semi-successfully to integrate into the indigenous population. While both the Werelians and Terrans appear to be descendants of Hainish settlers, there’s been too much genetic deviation, and the two populations can’t intermingle successfully. Planet of Exile both critiques and props up the anthropological model of contact with indigenous people. Because of Le Guin’s upbringing as the child of famous anthropologists, this is a concern that resonates through much of her work.

The Telling
I feel like a jerk for listing so many of Le Guin’s Hainish novels in the bottom dozen of this list, but the Hainish novels constitute a huge part of her catalog, so maybe it’s just statistics. Despite the tenuous threads linking one Hainish novel to another, most of them feel standalone, and Le Guin never did much fuss with strict continuity. That said, The Telling feels apart from the the other Hainish novels, off in an eddy. Sutty, an Anglo-Indian Ekumen observer, is sent to the planet of Aka. Aka’s indigenous cultural expression is called the Telling, which, like the Tao or Confucianism, is a practice more than a religion, a folklore more than a mythology, but nevertheless deeply ingrained. The autocracy of Aka has outlawed the Telling, and Sutty dodges her government minder while trying to immerse herself in this forbidden lore.

Voices
Voices is the second novel in The Annals of the Western Shore, one of Le Guin’s young adult series. The novel follows Memer, who lives in the city Ansul. Ansul is an occupied city, and Memer herself is a “siege brat,” the daughter of an Ald soldier who raped her mother early in the Ald’s conquest of the city. Like all of the Western Shore novels, Voices takes on very serious issues, especially for a book ostensibly aimed at the young adult. (But then Le Guin never viewed writing for the young as a lesser form of writing, or watered down writing for adults.) Le Guin does not vilify the occupying Ald, nor romanticize the people of Ansul overmuch; this is not a simple tale of overlords and resistance written in black and white. She deals quite seriously with the conflict between a monotheistic society and a polytheistic one, and the inequities of a society both broken and built by violence. Still, there is something arm’s length about Voices. I feel like it is better considered than felt, more structural than emotional. Certainly, a reader with other predilections might sort this novel higher, but for me, I feel like the other novels in the series strike a better balance between heart and head.

The Word for World Is Forest
The Word for World Is Forest is the closest thing to a polemic Le Guin ever wrote. Written at the height of the Vietnam War, it is set on forest world of Athshe, which has been colonized by the resource-hungry Terra. (Terra is Earth; this is another Hainish novel.) The indigenous people of Athshe have been enslaved to help the Terrans deforest their world. Athsheans practice something like lucid dreaming, but on a collective scale: they all dream together. When the Athshean Selver’s wife is raped and murdered by a colonial commander named Davidson, he wakes up, in a sense, learning to resist the Terran conquerors, sometimes by violence. He tells Davidson at one point that Davidson has given him the gift of murder. (When James Cameron’s Avatar was released, the comparisons with The Word for World is Forest were inescapable.) In this novel, Le Guin’s anger is very close to the surface: for the cruelty of colonization, the pillaging of the natural world, the treatment of people as resources.

The Eye of the Heron
The Eye of the Heron follows the conflict between two groups of Terran settlers on an otherwise unpeopled world. One group is the descendants of a penal colony, and the other the children of pacifist political dissenters. The pacifists, who are largely farmers, are planning on starting another farming community further inland. The other group, who see themselves as the oligarchical rulers of the planet, are unwilling to let people they see as subject go. The Eye of the Heron feels very shocking because (spoiler) halfway through, the pacifists’ hero figure is dead in the street, killed by oligarchs. Le Guin wrote later about this death:

“While I was writing The Eye of the Heron in 1977, the hero insisted on destroying himself before the middle of the book. “Hey,” I said, “you can’t do that, you’re the hero. Where’s my book?” I stopped writing. The book had a woman in it, but I didn’t know how to write about women. […] It taught me that I didn’t have to write like an honorary man anymore, that I could write like a woman, and feel liberated in doing so.”

Le Guin is rightly lauded as a feminist writer who wrote sensitively about gender, but her career started way back when; her early novels were written back before women were invented (to use Le Guin’s own comic phrasing on the matter). The Eye of the Heron is a turning point for her, opening up the narrative possibilities of writing about the concerns of women. It also touches on themes, like the practice of non-violence, that will come to full fruition in her most influential works, novels like The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness.

Searoad
Searoad is one of three short story collections I’ve included in this ranking, as I believe they constitute a novel-in-stories: shorter narratives tied so tightly thematically or geographically (or both) that they read like a novel. Like Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, which is an early exemplar of this form, Searoad takes place in a single locale: the fictional seaside town of Klatsand, Oregon. The stories largely focus on the lives of women in this tourist economy, and involve multiple generations of the town’s citizens over decades. Though Le Guin is primarily known as an SFF writer, Searoad is one of many of her fictions that defy that label. My favorite story here is about the proprietor of a run-down motel who naps in the unoccupied rooms, sleeping away the time she always means to use improving the property. Her inadvertent eavesdropping on a young man sobbing out an unknown grief in an adjoining room completely slayed me. This may give you an indication of how melancholic and glancing these stories are, focused so keenly on the everyday, but dreaming larger.

Powers
Even though Powers was awarded the Nebula (which is, along with the Hugo, one of the two most prestigious SFF awards in the States) for best novel in 2009, I don’t think it’s the best of the three novels in The Annals of the Western Shore. (That was a weird year for the Nebula; despite the establishment of the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult novels two years prior, two of the six nominated works for best novel were young adult novels: Powers, and Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother.) Powers follows Gavir, a young man and slave who is trained to be teacher and tutor to the noble family who owns him. His upbringing is quiet and insulated, almost bucolic; his owners are “the good kind” (never mind that there is no good kind of slaver). It is only after the brutal murder of one of his fellow slaves that he understands the true parameters of his inequity. He escapes to a hard wandering in the wilderness. Powers tackles necessary and vital themes, and Le Guin is as the height of her powers as a wordsmith.

The Farthest Shore
The Farthest Shore is the third in the original trilogy of Earthsea novels Le Guin wrote, one after the other, in the late ’60s and early ’70s. They are all set on an archipelago of islands in a vast, uncharted sea, in a place with magic, dragons, and wizards. Each novel at least touches on the life of Ged, who becomes the arch-mage of all of Earthsea, though he’s not always the protagonist. Earthsea is a place with a word-magic, where if you can speak the true name of a thing, you can influence that thing. At the beginning of The Farthest Shore, there’s a malaise on Earthsea: not only is magic faltering, but even non-magical crafts are suddenly forgotten, even by the most adept. The archmage Ged leaves his seat of power on Roke Island, and travels with a minor prince, Arren, who came to Roke first to plead for his people in these devastating times. Magic in Earthsea is dying because a sorcerer has sought to kill death and become immortal. This throws off the entire equilibrium of islands, one Ged and the boy who will be king must reestablish. The Farthest Shore is a beautiful and fitting conclusion of the original Earthsea trilogy. It is also so, so sad.

Lavinia
Lavinia is something of an oddity in Le Guin’s career. It can’t rightly be called fantasy or science fiction. It’s not one of her Orsinian Tales either, set in a central European country of her own devising, but nevertheless in a recognizable European history. Lavinia is fairy tale, of sorts, but grounded in the prosaic; a story of a simple life lived in the margins of epic poetry and the national founding myth. Lavinia is the story of Aeneas’ second wife, a princess of Latinum, with whom he was prophesied to start an empire. In Virgil’s Aeneid, she doesn’t utter a word. In that lacuna, Le Guin tells the story of a devout daughter of her homeland, married off to a warlord. But Lavinia’s marriage to the scarred Aeneas, hero of the Trojan war, is strangely soft and tender, and so much more sweet for its brevity. I’m not ashamed to admit I burst into tears at the end of this novel, though I couldn’t tell you rightly why. There’s a slip there, in the end, from the lived life to the mythic, and so much is both lost and gained in that transmutation. Lavinia is a strange novel, to be sure, with a sense of day to day life that’s often missing from myth, even while it stretches its dark wings and soars into the mythopoeic.

Malafrena
Malafrena is the only novel-length narrative in Le Guin’s Orsinian stories, which take place in an invented central European country over the last century and a half. (The name of the country, Orsinia, is something of a joke: Le Guin’s first name, Ursula, means bear, and Orsinia takes its name from the same word roots; it is Le Guin’s own country.) Malafrena follows Itale Sorde from his bucolic beginnings on the eponymous lake Malafrena, out into revolutionary politics of the capital, and then back again to his humble beginnings. “True journey is return,” she wrote in contemporaneous journals. When the Library of America sought to publish Le Guin’s works—a serious literary honor—they began with her Orsinian stories, at her behest. To me, Malafrena feels old school, like an expert ventriloquism of late 19th Century and early Modernist novels, from its concerns to its historical situation. It’s good, but it’s not good in the ways Le Guin is good when she’s writing in the worlds she creates herself. It’s funny that a country she named for herself doesn’t feel quite like it’s written in her voice.

Gifts
Gifts is the first of The Annals of the Western Shore. The novel follows two young people, Gry and Orrec, who live in an insular and somewhat backward region, the kind of place where grudges are nursed for generations against neighbors. The family groups in the area also have hereditary powers, which are exulted. Orrec is blindfolded at the fairly late adolescent discovery of his gift, forced to live without his sight, due to his father’s insistence that his wild gift of “unmaking” is simply too lethal to allow. That this wild gift coincidentally aligns with his father’s petty concerns that Orrec has dangerous gifts (or is known to have dangerous gifts) is well more important than Orrec’s sight. Gry is the daughter of a neighboring hold with which Orrec’s family is often violently feuding; her gifts involve a communication with animals, one she refuses to use for hunting, to the irritation of her people. Orrec and Gry come of age in a small, mean, vituperative community, and struggle to live with gifts that seem like anything but. Their relationship is tense and sweet, both difficult and easy, and their rough world is richly drawn.

Four Ways to Forgiveness
Four Ways to Forgiveness is written as four interlinking novellas that concern the planets of Werel and Yeowe. (The planet that is the setting for Planet of Exile and City of Illusion is also called Werel, but they are not the same place; Le Guin simply forgot she’d already used the name in novels written decades previous.) The largest government on Werel, Voe Deo, practices a form of chattel slavery, even into an industrial revolution where the slaves become known as “assets”, leased out to the factories. Voe Deo also uses its slave population to colonize the otherwise uninhabited planet of Yeowe. The stories in Four Ways to Forgiveness largely center on the period when Yeowe began its fight for independence (and the larger abolition of slavery) and the period directly after, when the people of both Werel and Yeowe have to learn how to live without slavery. Though there’s something hopeful about these narratives—they are “ways to forgiveness” in the end—these are uneasy stories about deeply traumatized people. It’s a way to forgiveness, but not the end.

The Other Wind
The Other Wind is the last of the Earthsea stories. The first three, written altogether in the late ’60s and early ’70s, share a certain narrative unity. Le Guin returned to Earthsea in the 1990s with Tehanu, which she called, at the time, the “last book of Earthsea.” As it turns out, Earthsea wasn’t done with her, and she wrote two more books in the world: Tales from Earthsea, a collection of short stories that deepens the lore of the history of magic, and The Other Wind. The Other Wind comes to terms with and explodes a number of fantasy conventions. A simple man named Alder, who is adept at mending, is visited by his late wife in dream. She seeks to tear down the wall between the living and the dead in his dreams, but in ways that seem to alter his living life. He seeks out the former archmage, Ged, who poured out his power in The Farthest Shore, and is now just a man, and Lebannen, who is now king. Like most of the Earthsea stories, The Other Wind is story of a journey, both on the water, and into the self.

Guardian review written at the time of its publication said it best: “Gradually, in a masterpiece of chilling narration, the whole living world becomes unable to sleep. And to fix that, the world has to become like our own, to become like our un-magical selves: to grow up.” The Other Wind is a strange, sad, melancholic narrative about childhood’s end, and the exhilarating possibilities of death’s revival. It’s a young adult novel that drops the young, which hurts an exhilarates as much as that always does.

Changing Planes
Changing Planes is another novel-in-stories, where a collection of shorter stories feels like a novel. Changing Planes feels especially novel-esque because it’s a frame narrative, where an introductory story is told to set the stage for other stories that exist somehow within that framing device. (A widely known frame narrative, one that many of us encountered in middle school, is Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: the folk on a pilgrimage in 14th C. England tell each other stories.) The frame in Changing Planes is based on a pun in the story “Sita Dulip’s Method.” Sita discovers that the boredom, discomfort, and low grade anxiety produced by the forced inactivity when you’re changing planes (or otherwise stuck in waiting rooms) can cause a person to change planes of reality. A myriad of other worlds open up to the casual traveler. Some of the stories about these other worlds are in the vein of ethnographic studies; others are deeper dives into lives lived. Every world Le Guin details in this collection could easily be a stage for an entire novel, or series of novels. Instead, she gives us this this almost casually masterful collection of thought experiments and cool ideas, a waiting room that opens to a larger world of imagination.

Always Coming Home
It’s generally true that when an author writes about their hometown, what they end up saying has a strange, hard to define depth. Though Le Guin is strongly associated, as a writer, with the Pacific Northwest—she made her home both fictionally and in reality in the temperate rainforests of Oregon—she’s a California girl, born and raised. (Fun fact: Le Guin and Philip K. Dick both graduated from Berkeley high school in 1947, though they never interacted.) The setting of Always Coming Home is a California peopled by the peaceable Kesh, who “might be going to have lived a long, long time from now.” The first half follows Stone Telling, a daughter of a Kesh mother and a father from the more rigid, expansionist Dayao. The second half is the field journal of an ethnographer called Pandora who describes the culture of the Kesh through poems, stories, recipes, site maps, and even music. (Some early editions included a cassette tape of this music in a box set.) As befits the strange future/past tense of the novel, this California feels like a post-apocalyptic pastoral, taking place generations past modernity in a place aware of such a thing, but not beholden to it; modern America is just another set of folk stories.

Many years ago I had a conversation with a fellow Ursine devotee, and he called Always Coming Home her most deeply felt work. I was surprised by that at the time; this is not a novel one sinks into. I have since come to understand what he meant, and wholeheartedly agree. The sense of retrospective—the way both halves of the novel turn back to consider a childhood (in Stone Telling’s narrative) and the larger cultural milieu (in Pandora’s notes)—feels like Le Guin considering her own childhood using the cultural tools she learned during that childhood. Her parents were both well-regarded anthropologists, and there are strong similarities between the Kesh and the Native American myths and history recorded by her parents. Her childhood, and its Northern California setting, therefore exist in a half-place, something like a mythic past that that nonetheless tells tales of contemporary America. It is considered at something closer than arm’s length, and further than memoir. Always Coming Home doesn’t hew to anything like a traditional narrative structure; it is more like the cultural detritus we all haul with us out of our home towns, laid out with the most careful hand.

Tehanu
The three original Earthsea novels are the kind of young adult stories at which fantasy literature excels, set in a pre-industrial place where people have all the trouble of growing up, without all the ornament of modern life to molder and grow dated as the fiction ages. Two decades later, Le Guin returned to Earthsea, and found it changed, as she had changed as a writer. Tehanu finds Tenar, the once child priestess from The Tombs of Atuan, now living a quiet life as a solitary grandmother on Gont, the childhood home of the archmage Ged. Tenar has taken in the child Therru, who was sexually assaulted and nearly burned to death by her father and the vagabond band she was born into. Therru is treated as bad luck and bad omen: the lore of Gont maintains that the damaged deserve their bad luck; that is how they came to be damaged. Worse, bad luck can be catching.

Tenar and Therru travel to see the wizard Ogion on his deathbed, and there intersect with Ged, once archmage, who has poured his power out to seal the breach between life and death in The Farthest Shore. Ged and Tenar renew their acquaintance, which was begun so, so long ago, and deepens to something more. Ged is deeply traumatized by the loss of his powers, and Tenar gives him room to grieve. All of the principle characters of Tehanu are hurt in some way, struggling to rebuild lives that have been burnt to ashes. The ending, where Tenar, Ged, and the child Therru must confront the violence that has so changed their lives, is exultant: a beautiful, burning awaking of Therru’s true nature. Tehanu doesn’t feel much like a young adult novel—it’s too grim, and too violent in places—but its earnest, heartfelt, and soaring portraiture of a burned child coming into her fiery power feels like a necessary tale for both the young and the old.

The Left Hand of Darkness
Published first in 1969, The Left Hand of Darkness was a stunning novel at the time. Genly Ai, an envoy for a loose galactic confederation called the Ekumen, is sent to the icy planet of Gethen as something between an ambassador and an anthropologist. The people on Gethen are ambisexual: at their times of sexual fertility, their bodies shift to one sex or the other, but otherwise they have no fixed sex. They are unique in the known worlds in this way. Genly Ai’s primary relationship is with Estraven, the prime minister of the constitutional monarchy of Karhide, the country that Genly is embedded within. Interstellar travel and the concept of extra-Gethenian humans seem unbelievable to the Gethenians; Genly is seen as either a slightly mad curiosity or a dangerous disruption. Due to Genly’s Terran ideas of masculinity, his distrust of Estraven’s mercurial sexuality, and his misunderstanding of the cultural practice of shifgrethor (which is something like a code of conduct more instinctual than codified), his sojourn in Karhide is near-disastrous. Estraven makes very real sacrifices for Genly in their halting, political, and personal relationship, one colored by both the conflict of empires and the simple mis/understanding of two people. Ultimately, the other envoys from the Ekumen kept in stasis above the planet are allowed to awaken and speak for the Ekumen’s goals.

In the intervening decades, aspects of The Left Hand of Darkness have become antiquated or essentialist—Le Guin herself first somewhat defensively justified her use of the default pronoun “he” for all Gethenians, but later acknowledged that “he” need not be the default. Overall, the ways the novel grounds itself in character study keeps it from being a period piece, read for its important contribution to SFF, and not because it’s a relatable novel. When the members of the Ekumenical team touch down on Gethen, their binary sexuality seems so remarkable to Genly, who has spend the whole novel struggling with Gethenian ambisexuality. Le Guin does such a good job of immersing you (and Genly) in fluid sexuality of the Gethenians that the intrusion, at the end, of people who embody a sexual binary seems truly strange.

The Dispossessed
Le Guin’s Hainish novels are all bound together by a specific technology (a plot device, if you will): the ansible, an invention that allows instantaneous communication across interstellar distance. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia tells the story of the ansible’s invention, by the physicist Shevek. The novel also, as its subtitle indicates, takes on the interactions of various political systems. The setting is the planet Urras and its colonized moon, Anarres. The people of Annares are anarcho-syndicalist dissenters from one of the countries of Urras, having colonized the moon two centuries previous. They are largely perceived as naive dreamers by the various political factions and countries of their planet of origin, which is belied by the incredibly harsh conditions on Anarres. You have to be tough to survive life on the colonized moon.

In chapters that shift back and forth in time, the novel follows Shevek through his childhood and education on Anarres. When he runs afoul of political dogma in his scientific work on Anarres, Shevek travels to a university on Urras to further his study. His experience of the traditionalist, capitalist society he encounters on Urras is tragicomic at times—there’s a depiction of a faculty party where Shevek is several leagues out of his depth which would not be out of place in a campus novel. Although the university on Urras allows him to complete his General Temporal Theory (which provides the theoretical framework for the invention of the ansible) the political structure and society of Urras is repellent to Shevek. The novel is a story in ironies and dialectics: the scientist who could only be produced by this society, but could only complete his life’s work in that. The interactions between the various countries, societies, factions, and parties of the populations on Urras and Anarres are a direct refutation of the skiffy trope of The Planet of Hats, where fictional worlds resolve to the most simplistic economies; I find it difficult to encapsulate all the political maneuvering in the story of Shevek’s great invention. But The Dispossessed is also the story of a single person. Like The Left Hand of Darkness, the focus on the personal grounds a novel of ideas into bedrock.

The Lathe of Heaven
The Lathe of Heaven tells the story of George Orr, a young man who is plagued by what he calls “effective dreams,” or dreams that change the nature of reality itself to conform to the dreamscape. George is the only one who is aware of these changes. He’s remanded to the psychiatrist and sleep researcher William Haber, due to his abuse of drugs to try to stave off the effective dreams. Haber begins tinkering with Orr’s effective dreams, trying to improve reality through his manipulations of Orr’s dreamscape. This results in escalating dystopias. When Haber pushes Orr to dream of a solution to world overpopulation, a plague kills billions. When he tries for a world without racial strife, everyone turns grey, and Orr’s social worker, friend, and sometimes paramour, Heather, who is biracial, ceases to exist. Like a series of wishes in folklore, each effective dream seeks to solve the problem of the last wish, but then creates another.

The Lathe of Heaven is a beautifully written novel, an almost perfect example of Le Guin’s compact and insightful prose. She never much went in for poetic prose or the extended metaphor —her observations tend to be grounded very closely in material culture. The Lathe of Heaven opens with the metaphor of a jellyfish: “Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.” This image pops up again and again, a metaphor for her conception of the Tao, for the tides of dream, for the eddies of history. (The name of the novel was taken from a line by Taoist writer Chuang Tzu, though, amusingly, Le Guin discovered later that this expression is a mistranslation.) The intensity of the relationships in The Lathe of Heaven—George and Haber and Heather in almost claustrophobic proximity, set against the changing canvass of history—and the beauty of the language Le Guin uses to tell their stories set this novel apart.

A Wizard of Earthsea / The Tombs of Atuan
I’m going to cheat and place both A Wizard of Earthsea and its sequel, The Tombs of Atuan, as Le Guin’s best. A Wizard of Earthsea is regularly (and rightly) called out as one of Le Guin’s most important and influential novels; less so The Tombs of Atuan. But I feel like, considered together, the two books form a vital dialectic, a duology that is greater than each individual novel. A Wizard of Earthsea tells the story of a boy’s growing up, an almost perfect iteration of the Western fantasy monomyth slash bildugsroman. This sort of story—one of a boy growing into a man—is a mainstay of fantasy literature (sometimes frustratingly so). Le Guin tells it so sharply, with such an important twist, that alone it would be her best.

“The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.”

So begins A Wizard of Earthsea, a slender young adult novel with a most common theme: a talented boy’s journey to becoming a great man. The talented boy in this telling is Sparrowhawk, born in obscurity on Gont, an island on a archipelago known for wizards and pirates and not much else. The magic of Earthsea is word-magic, a language of making and unmaking that can be learned by people, but is native to the dragons of the world. (Dragons can lie in this true language; humans can’t.) During his education on Roke Island, Sparrowhawk attempts forbidden magic (like many matriculating heroes, Sparrowhawk is something of an arrogant jerk) which backfires, conjuring a gebbeth, a shadow creature that is tied to Sparrowhawk. The archmage gives up his life to repel the shadow, and Sparrowhawk is scarred and grievously injured.

Nonetheless, Sparrowhawk, whose true name in the language of magic is Ged, eventually receives his wizard’s staff, takes a position as wizard on a neighboring island, and does battle (largely through language) with the dragons of Pendor. These are the events that will make him famous, the things he will be remembered for in song. But the shadow still haunts him, and Ged leaves his posting in order to either find or escape his shadow. At this point, the novel becomes a picaresque, traveling almost haphazardly through the waters and island of the archipelago of Earthsea. In the end, Ged and his dear friend Vetch sail clear off the map, onto shifting near-material sands, and he and his shadow name one another. Like the confrontation with the dragon, Ged’s final conflict with his shadow isn’t one of brute strength or some blinkered concept of “goodness,” but one of balance and equilibrium, of empathy and understanding. I name you; I know you.

Le Guin’s simple tale of matriculation stands out in its simplicity. She packs in a wizard’s mean upbringing, his boarding school days, his exhilarating successes and embarrassing failures, into a novel that never feels rushed, even while it tells a tightly constructed tale. And the twist: Le Guin reveals, after the getting-to-know-yous of Ged’s important life, that he has black skin. In fact, most of the people of the archipelago range from red-brown to blue-black. Early covers elide this important detail; even a miniseries produced in 2004 got it horribly wrong, much to Le Guin’s irritation. Maybe it doesn’t matter what the skin color of fantasy characters is, but if it really doesn’t matter, then why are they always white?

The Tombs of Atuan is set in the Kargish empire, where people indeed have white skin. Though part of the larger archipelago of Earthsea, the Kargs set themselves apart from the Hardic people (who are Ged’s people.) Where the rest of Earthsea hews to something like a Taoist appreciation of balance in magic, the Kargs are beholden to the Old Powers. Their society is based on a theocracy of squabbling god-kings. Tenar is taken as a young child to be a priestess of one of these Old Powers, in a cloister built on a labyrinth. She’s referred to as Arha, the Eaten One, and is raised in a suffocating convent peopled by women and eunuchs as a god-child (or goddess-child), the reincarnation of the previous Eaten One. Her experience is one of frustrating enclosure, hemmed in by the parameters of duty and expectation, in addition the the physical constraints of her isolated cloister; there’s literally nowhere to go.

She finds freedom, ironically, in exploring the undertomb, the underground labyrinth, a place only she, as Arha, may enter. It is there she finds Sparrowhawk, the archmage Ged, injured and diminished by the effects of the Old Powers. He’s come to retrieve (or steal) an artifact, but he’s failed and failing. Ged’s intrusion into Arha’s structured and bounded life is a shock; he puts everything about her life into question. They enact a series of conversations in the dark of the undertomb, conversations which feel dangerous to Arha.

While A Wizard of Earthsea gives us an almost comforting coming of age story, The Tombs of Atuan sails right off the map, giving us a monomyth scrambled by the vital and necessary aspects of race and gender. Ged is a surprise to Arha; The Tombs of Atuan is a surprise to the reader. A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan function as a dialectic, as call and response about gender and power, race and culture. They are beautiful, careful books that tell essential stories in Le Guin’s quick, clear prose, and are filled with the themes most vital to her storytelling. They are everything I love best about the writer I love best.

What is your favorite Ursula K. Le Guin novel?

Review: Storm Echo by Nalini Singh

Just recently, I learned there was a Psy-Changeling book by Nalini Singh — and another one coming this summer — that I hadn’t read. I tell you, I checked that shit out of the library with a swiftness. Coming off the high of Last Guard — which addressed some of my key criticisms of this series, on a meta level — I was hoping Storm Echo would sustain that peak. And while Singh does address some of my issues in this novel, the whole situation felt somewhat tired, like she was just going through the motions a bit. Singh has made use of this exact situation — uptight character, often Psy, faces inevitable death, until someone with a zest for life fucks them out of it — in more than a couple books in this series, e.g. Shield of Winter, Ocean Light. Also, the main characters met at some point in the past, forged an instant connection in some horrific trauma, and then lost each other again, e.g. Heart of Obsidian, Last Guard.

And look, I get it. Even with opening another island, so to speak, when Singh branched out to the Mercant family and the wolf and bear clans in Moscow, she’s written 20-odd full ass novels and myriad novellas, short stories, and epilogues set in this world. Recycling is inevitable, especially with the sort of themes Singh seems drawn to over and again, such as recovery from horrific trauma, both physical and psychic, and acceptance of the imperfectly healed self as worthy of both love and acceptance. Themes which are the reason I keep coming back, I might add, especially when paired with her focus on simple, physical pleasures like the heat of a cup of tea, or the soft fit of clothes that make you feel good to wear. Maybe that’s a weird thing to say, but I just love that beautiful life philosophy mixed with an unflinching acknowledgement that shit’s sometimes fucked.

We’ve seen Ivan Mercant before, most notably in Silver Silence and Last Guard, which both focus on members of the Mercant family, all of whom are the grandchildren of Ena Mercant. Silver is the heir apparent; Arwen is the clothes-horsey gay; Canto is the grouchy disabled guy; and Ivan is the assassin, question mark? Sometime just before the fall of Silence — notably, when the Psy were going nutso and murder-spreeing due to rot in the PsyNet — Ivan was training at some lunatic survivalist center run by wolf Changelings, when he ran across a woman called Leilei (a nickname for Soleil) in the woods. He’s all messed up from the insane training, and because she is a Changeling healer, she orders him to sit down and let her patch him up. He’s clearly smitten from the first, but doesn’t exactly understand what motivates him to keep seeking her out. They enact a quietly adorable courtship until some massively bad shit goes down, and he loses track of her. Most of the novel then catches up to them seven or so years later. Also some bullshit with the Scarabs is happening, but I’ll address that later.

Now, usually, I am not that into characters who fall into insta-love, but don’t know they’ve fallen into insta-love; what are these feelings I’m feeling; what agony; &c. But somehow it worked for me here. It’s funny to think of those early Psy-Changeling books and how clumsy and bizarre some of those courtships were — Lucas Hunter was a straight up stalker, for example — and compare it to the fragile, tenuous connection Ivan and Soleil forge in Storm Echo. Singh doesn’t put too much weight on their connection at first, but lets it build slowly as they circle closer and closer to one another. It’s aching. Frankly, I haven’t ever thought of Singh as adept at pining before — there’s usually at least one of a pairing who’s a big dumb dominant who’s going to big dumb dominate the other — but Storm Echo shows she’s added it to her repertoire. (Or maybe expanded it? You could probably argue that Aden and Zaira from Shards of Hope have some successful pining too.) After their meet-cute and nascent courtship, Soleil is grievously and almost mortally injured in one of those Psy attacks that were happening when the PsyNet was rotting. Because of some football-hiding, Ivan didn’t know her legal name, and assumed she didn’t come to meet him because she just wasn’t that into him. When he learns about the attack, he tries to track her down, but in the ensuing chaos, a lot of records were incomplete or lost.

Which brings me to something I love to see in Psy-Changeling novels: a shitty predatory Changeling pack. Soleil is part of the SkyElm pack, which was originally run by her asshole of a grandfather. He was mad her mom ran off with a human, and only accepted Soleil back into SkyElm when her parents were killed in a car accident. Despite Soleil being a healer — which is a structurally important part of the pack — her grandfather was a huge dick to her, a cruelty which is continued by Monroe, the pack alpha after her grandfather. After the Psy massacre — which only Monroe, Soleil, and a handful of other pack members survive — Monroe throws her out of the pack. Not long after this, Monroe makes the strategically fatal blunder of fucking around with Lucas Hunter, leader of DarkRiver and all around badass, after which he fatally finds out. The remaining SkyElm members are folded into DarkRiver, but because Soleil was packless and drifting, she doesn’t know that they’re still alive. She thinks Hunter has killed them all.

I’ve said this before, but I’m going to hum a few bars because I believe it: Both mate-bonding and pack-bonding are emotional mechanisms which often cast Changelings as incapable of hurting children or bullying others, which can make them hard to relate to and more than a little high-handed. One could argue — and I have — the duality of the Psy and Changelings coming together is the ultimate thrust of the series: the Psy, who are all too capable of horrific abuse and sociopathy must learn from the Changelings, who are almost constitutionally incapable of it. Packs like SkyElm show us Changelings can be just a venal, small-minded, and racist as the rest of us fumblers. For instance, Soleil’s grandfather limited the pack to ocelot Changelings only, something Monroe continued, which lead to structural insufficiency, i.e. not enough dominants. I think this explanation is kind of garbage, but this is explicitly the in-world argument for why SkyElm sucked and got itself wiped out of existence: there weren’t enough cop-types around when shit went down, so everyone got murdered.

I have some trouble with this, a little because it allows DarkRiver to get up on a high horse and ride around on it foreverrrr, and a lot because ultimately SkyElm didn’t get all murdered because of bad leadership, but because a bunch of Psy randomly started killing folk. The outbreak of Psy violence and its horrific effects were not natural consequences of SkyElm’s bad leadership, except obliquely. Be that as it may, I still appreciate examples of the benevolent Changelings not being so benevolent. The trajectory of much of the book is about both Soleil and Ivan — who have been loners either by choice or circumstance for much of their adult lives — coming to accept the love and affection of their families — found or otherwise. I continue to enjoy how the Mercants kept an emotional core to their family, even under Silence, and I completely loved how Ivan was folded into the Mercant family after the death of his mother. (There’s a spoiler here involving his mother’s parentage, so I’m not going to get into it, but suffice it to say: Ena Mercant is a GOAT.)

I found Ivan’s backstory particularly moving, partially because I don’t feel like Singh has been especially kind to addicts in this series. I recently reread Caressed by Ice, which is only the third in the series, and the sneering dismissal of addicts as “weak” really stood out for me. Ivan’s mother was a hot mess and did unforgivable things — such as taking the Psy drug Jax why she was pregnant — but she is afforded a little compassion and understanding, even if it goes almost completely unsaid. Many, many of the Psy protagonists in this series are subject to just horrific abuse, either by parents or people acting in loco parentis. Ivan certainly suffered under his mother’s indifferent care. I even think the way Singh shows how the good times — when Ivan’s mom is on a good high and telling tales about how they’re going to live in a nice apartment and she’s going to have a job, etc — are sometimes worse than the hungry, dark moments, because it’s the hope that gets you.

Eventually, we learn who Ivan’s mother’s mother is, and, while it’s never dramatized, that had to have been a truly traumatic childhood. I think we can understand why she decided to check out, even if obviously that’s not a great thing to do, and with a child, worse. I’m not entirely sanguine about Ivan deciding not to extra-judicially murder dealers because it makes Soleil have a sad, because he shouldn’t have been extra-judicially murdering dealers in the first place, but baby steps on accepting that addiction is an illness, and literally, by definition, outside of someone’s control. So. The things I enjoyed about Storm Echo ended up being more meta than specific, more about the texture of the world than this specific pairing. Both Ivan and Soleil are a little basic, with basic problems. And you know what? I’m mostly fine with it. With a series this long, I’m ok with installments that just edge the mythology forward.

Which reminds me! I was going to talk about the Scarabs. The Scarabs, and the Scarab Queen (or Architect) have been the antagonist for most, if not all, of the Psy-Changeling Trinity books (which is kind of Psy-Changeling, Season 2, starting at the fall of Silence.) Tbh, none of the Scarab mythology has interested me at all, so I have only the most tenuous grasp on what even is going on. Maybe some Psy have their powers go nuts and then their heads explode? I have zero idea why they’re even called Scarabs. This evolving mythology gets a lot of page time in Storm Echo, enough that it made me want to either wiki wtf is happening, or figure out the last book with a major mythology dump and reread. I’m definitely going to reread Last Guard, because I know I freaking loved that one, and I never wrote about it at all. If I measured success solely by how engaged I am with a series, all other considerations be damned, Psy-Changeling is crazy successful. It’s a decent metric in the end, because I love how into this series I am, and I love how Singh just keeps sinking the hook, again and again.

Zombie Children

An Incomplete List of Zombie Children Found in Film

Zombie children are very rare in both films and television, and when you do encounter them, they tend to have (had) names, i.e. we met them when alive, and watched them turn. Maybe it’s because dead children are singularly upsetting, or maybe it’s because working with child actors is a pain in the ass. Kids can only be on set so many hours, then throw in however many hours in make-up, and they become an even bigger pain in the ass to shoot around. Either way, if a zombie child appears in a narrative, they tend to be freighted with meaning. You’re just not going to squander the shock value of young lives snuffed out and murderously reanimated. So I’m going to go through and document the zombie children I can think of, and see if we can’t say anything about death, childhood, and the nuclear family.

Before that, lemme get all wonky for a bit. I don’t particularly like getting into the weeds arguing about the taxonomy of a zombie (which is a lie because I’m about to do it at length). They’re made up creatures; the criteria aren’t going to be hard and fast. However, I think I should probably make some broad stabs at it, given how often I end up arguing with dudes on the Internet. Whether a zombie is technically alive or undead is less important for me than if that creature violently attacks people in mobs. So a blood-borne rage virus which renders a living person violently feral, like the one found in 28 Days Later, counts as a form of zombiism. By contrast, Claudia from Interview with a Vampire, while technically an undead child, is a calculating killer, and she has an emotional life beyond just killing. Just to make this complicated: sometimes there are zombies whose emotional states are the same as breathing humans, like Liv in iZombie or Murphy on Z Nation. They are always undead, not technically alive like a rage-zombie, and, unlike vampires, their bodies putrefy and decay. Often, technically alive zombies will be fully dead in a relatively short matter of time, as whatever fuels their murderous behavior renders them incapable of caring for themselves. The corruption of both appetite and flesh, a degradation of form and purpose, is ultimately what typifies a zombie, and that animating idea is more important than fast/slow, alive/dead, magic/science, or other nitpicky details.

An interesting edge case is the creatures in the Will Smith version of I Am Legend, which are zombie-like in their swarming murderous mobs, but then appear to be technically living, capable of emotional bonds, and can care for themselves (and others) in at least a rudimentary way. In the source material, the same-named novel by Richard Matheson, these creatures were referred to as vampires, which might be a better fit. They do look an awful lot like the vampires in The Strain or The Passage. I would argue that the arc of the film is uncovering the creatures’ true nature, from being seen as members of a mindless mob to creatures driven by more complex motivations than braaaaaains. Because of this, the film opens with all the earmarks of a zombie film: decaying urban landscapes, the living under siege, a nostalgia for the present. As Smith learns the people he’s been experimenting on are at least partially cognizant of themselves as people, the real horror sets in: he’s the real monster. Anyway, long story short: I’d include I Am Legend in a list of zombie movies, even if I think the creatures are bad zombies, because the film purposely invokes so many tropes of zombie narratives. Genre isn’t just defined by the actors in the story, but by the construction of the narrative itself.

Couple few caveats:

I think zombie babies are in a different category, narratively speaking, so I wouldn’t include them in this list. They are even rarer in film than zombie children. I can only think of three in film, two of which are in Zach Snyder movies: Dawn of the Dead, which is included in this list, and Army of the Dead, which is not. The third is in this dreadful rip-off of 28 Days Later called Solar Impact. (There’s also a zombie baby in the first episode of Z Nation, and the whole sequence is incredibly silly.) ETA: Another incredibly silly zombie baby is in Peter Jackson’s splatter-stick film, Dead Alive. I am also excluding adolescents — which are much more common — because when I say children, I mean pre-pubescent, not under the age of 18. Additionally, in the process of researching this post, I discovered at least four instances of zombified classrooms so I’ll round them up separately. Though I’m focusing on movies so they wouldn’t be included anyway, I’ve detailed all the child zombies in The Walking Dead here. Maybe that’s a lot of caveats, but it’s my list so I make the rules.

Night of the Living Dead (1969)

Karen Cooper

The very first OG undead child, the one who had chased me through my nightmares since I encountered her in my adolescence, is the one in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Harry and Helen Cooper, along with their daughter, Karen, take refuge in the same farmhouse in which the lead Ben, the catatonic Barbra, and a pair of young lovers are sheltering. The girl has been bitten, and her parents take her down to the basement to care for her. Ben and the girl’s dad are at loggerheads from the first: Ben is convinced the basement is a death-trap; Harry wants to hole up down there for the duration. 

I’d kind of forgotten the specifics of this whole sequence, so I recently watched it again. I was bolted by the scene where the zombie child overpowers her mother — not because she’s stronger than her, but because the mother can’t defend herself against her own flesh and blood. I also had forgotten that Romero’s zombies are tool-users: the girl stabs her mother over and over and over again, in a scene reminiscent of the shower scene in Psycho, before she settles in to feast on her corpse. After her father betrays Ben, he’s shot by him, and stumbles down to the basement. There, he encounters his zombie daughter, who finishes him off. Ben ends up having to dispatch the whole zombie family, one after the other, when he, against his better judgement, retreats to the basement.

I’ve said this a number of times, but I think it’s true: You can almost read the farmhouse in Night of the Living Dead as a Freudian psychological structure: attic as superego, main floor as ego, and basement as id. It’s also a microcosm of the American body politic, as all of these archetypes bounce off each other and as their inevitable destruction bangs against the flimsy, permeable glass. That this family annihilation plays out, twice, in the id-based basement of the American subconscious is something indeed. Night of the Living Dead was written in the flux of the Vietnam war and the first American Civil Rights movement, and Karen’s reanimation is definitely a bellwether and a harbinger for the stressors that will bring down the myth of the American nuclear family.

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Unnamed children

This follow-up to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead includes a couple unnamed zombie children who try to attack one of the characters in an airport charthouse. They are played by the niece and nephew of Tom Savini, the man behind the special effects, and appear to be in the film more because of that relationship than because the narrative specified zombie children. Which is to say: the kids are extras, not characters. They’re also not actors: imbd trivia claims they are the only zombies in Romero’s whole oeuvre who spontaneously run. Apparently the kids couldn’t be bothered with the undead shuffle. These kids are somewhat notable because they are extras. Other than a brief glimpse of a zombie child on The Walking Dead while Alexandria is being overrun, I can’t think of many other zombie children who are part of the background cast exclusively.

Night of the Comet (1984)

Unnamed boy

Honestly, I don’t really get why the zombie in this delightful 80s apocalypse is a zombie child. A comet passes over the earth, desiccating most of the population to red dust. If you’re shielded by steel, you’re fine, but if you’re only partially shielded, you will eventually desiccate. Before that, you’ll move from huge asshole to zombie. A pair of sisters and a trucker called Hector are the only people at first in the film who survive the comet un-zombified. The girls know their family is gone, but Hector was on the road when the comet came. So he goes home to see if anyone made it. While there, a zombie child semi-knocks on the door, and then chases Hector all over the house when Hector opens the door. It’s an odd sequence because it’s mostly played for comedy. Hector keeps making quips — stuff like “there goes the neighborhood!” or “you’re lucky I like kids!” — as the kid chases him around. Eventually Hector slams enough doors behind him, makes it out of the house, and escapes back to the overt plot, and the zombie kid is never mentioned again. Paradoxically, maybe it’s because Night of the Comet is closer to a comedy that they use a zombie kid here, because usually zombie kids are super upsetting. Hector isn’t in any serious physical danger due to the zombie kid, and can dispense with any anxiety about his immediate family without overtaxing the viewer with worry. Strange.

28 Days Later (2002)

Unnamed boy

Bike messenger Jim comes out of a coma alone in a trashed hospital and an empty London. He soon learns that a rage virus has swept through the population. Eventually, he and three other survivors strike out for the countryside, following a repeating broadcast promising a cure for infection. They stop at a diner outside of Manchester to refuel, and Jim’s traveling companions tell him not to go inside the diner. He does anyway, and encounters an infected boy, the only living person in a building heaped with corpses. We don’t see Jim kill the child, but he leaves the diner wiping off his baseball bat. As far as I’m aware, this is the only person — infected or not — which Jim kills before they reach the source of the broadcast, a manor house fortified by a rogue army unit.

That Jim has killed a child comes up in his confrontation with the leader of the soldiers, Major West. Rhetorically, West tries to morally equate Jim’s act of self-defense with West’s plan to force the women into sexual slavery. (I should really say girl and woman; Hannah is just a child herself.) Both are necessary for survival, in West’s schema: the killing of the boy because of his immediate threat, and the rape of a woman and girl for the perpetuation of the species. Narratively speaking, I believe it is important that Jim has gotten his hands dirty in this new rage-filled world. He could have easily made it to West’s grotesque fiefdom having left the violence to the others in his group. That the rage-zombie Jim killed was a child adds freight to the guilt he must feel, and somewhat short-circuits his ability to respond to West’s monstrous equation. I can easily see a stupider version of 28 Days Later, one without Jim’s encounter with the infected child, in which a righteous Jim delivers a Rick Grimes-style homily about maintaining one’s humanity in the wake of violent inhumanity or whatever, but that is thankfully not what happens.

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

Vivian

Now, in this Zack Snyder remake of Romero’s original movie — which was itself a sequel — there is a full on zombie child who, like in The Walking Dead, is the first zombie we see on screen. (For context: The Walking Dead’s first episode, which also features a zombie child as the first zombie we meet, was six years later in 2010.) We first meet Vivian, yet another pretty blonde white girl, when nurse Ana comes home after a long shift at the hospital, where there was a lot of weirdness going on in the background. Vivian shows off her rollerblading skills, and Ana praises her. We see Vivian again once Ana and her husband have gone to bed. Vivian creeps up the dark hallway, which wakes up the husband. When she steps into the light, her face is torn and you can see her teeth exposed (again, almost exactly like the first zombie on The Walking Dead.) The husband goes to help the girl, she tears his throat out, and Ana intervenes, throwing the girl into the hallway and slamming the door shut.

I think Snyder uses a child here for two reasons. First, I think the shock value of having a pretty blonde girl be the bloody introduction to the zombie apocalypse is pretty high. (And something The Walking Dead exploits further by having said child zombie summarily shot.) But then also, by having an undead child annihilate Ana’s husband, we are well and truly shoved out of the domestic sphere. Snyder is telling us this movie isn’t about the nuclear family, something he’ll underline again, gruesomely, when Luda and her baby zombify. I wouldn’t say Snyder’s remake captures much of the social commentary about consumerism of Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead, but there are still flashes of social commentary in moments like this. I don’t think, generally, Snyder is in control of his material, semiotically speaking, but he’s still capable of putting his grubby, pulpy fingers on the pulse of the moment.

Wicked Little Things (2006)

Mary, others

Look, I said I didn’t want to get into a big thing about the taxonomy of zombies, but the little undead shits in this film are really, really bad zombies. I think a dead giveaway is that they are referred to in-text as zombies, which actual zombies almost never are, paradoxically. Anyway, the set-up isn’t dissimilar from Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the most recent largely forgettable outing in the Ghostbusters franchise. A mom and her two kids — one in high school, the other younger — inherit a creepy-ass house in the middle of nowhere; supernatural tomfoolery ensues. In Wicked Little Things, it’s that a bunch of kids killed in a local mine during ye olde robber baron times come out at night to kill people and eat them. Turns out, the kids’ now deceased dad was related to a mining family, so the zombie kids won’t chomp the family, except maybe the mom because she’s not blood-related. The minor miners have been all stirred up because the descendant of the dick who ran the mine (and a dick himself) is trying to buy up all the land to build a ski lodge or whatever, and furthermore there’s some weird lease on the property that expires if all the descendants die or something, and … honestly, you can see where all of these Scooby Doings are going, down to the land-owning asshole getting chomped by some Victorian children.

Horror is a rule-bound genre. These kids are something like hungry ghosts crossed with zombies, and the film is never clear which which rule-set they operate under, other than what is narratively convenient. The younger kid in the family befriends one of the minor miners, a girl called Mary, in a trope found in ghost stories: Mary is dismissed as an “imaginary friend” until the grown-ups admit weird shit is happening, whereupon she imparts important exposition. The ghost kids are corporeal enough to eat guts occasionally — like a zombie — but then seem to blip in and out of existence because of the sun or the necessity of a jump scare. They are also able to be vanquished by the usual ghostbusting method of completing unfinished business, not by headshots. I found this film both incredibly frustrating and frustratingly predictable.

[REC] (2007)

Jennifer Carmen, Tristana Medeiros, & an unnamed boy

Spanish film [REC] and its sequels actually have scads of zombie children — and, indeed, a zombie child antagonist — which makes it something of an outlier. There’s two in the first film, which is a found-footage affair with an after-hours camera crew following a group of firefighters on a midnight call. The first we encounter, a girl called Jennifer, before she turns. In the initial interview by the late night tv crew, Jennifer’s mother explains she’s got tonsillitis, and that the family dog is at the vet with an undiagnosed illness. Eventually a health inspector explains the dog has an illness “like rabies” — which is why the building has been quarantined — just in time for Jennifer to turn and bite her mother’s face. (Zombie children attacking their mothers is something of a theme.)

The backstory is hella confusing, and it only gets more complicated, opaque, and unsatisfying as the series progresses, but: The source of the rabies-like illness is a girl named Tristana Medeiros, a Portuguese girl identified by the Vatican as being demon-possessed, and also maybe there’s an enzyme some Vatican agent identifies? She’s the last child zombie we encounter in the narrative, when the last two survivors make it up to the attic, where the priest has been keeping Tristana prisoner so he can experiment on her or something. There the survivors turn into not-survivors when they’re attacked by first a zombie boy and Tristana, who has turned into a massive monster. All of this is shot in night-vision and very upsetting.

The science/religion cross doesn’t make a lot of sense, and the overtly batshit Catholic iconography of the latter installments — especially [•REC]³: Génesis — gets hard to follow and stupid. I think there’s probably something in these films which, for Catholics and people in Catholic-majority communities, speaks to the ongoing child sexual abuse scandals perpetrated by the church. The abused child reanimates and destroys everything she can get her hands on in enclosed, domestic spaces, pitting families and neighbors against each other. The authorities are worse than unhelpful, and simultaneously abet the outbreak and cover it up. Nasty stuff.

Pontypool (2008)

Maureen & Colleen

The zombiism in Pontypool is a rage virus transmitted by language, and not the more classic Romero shambler. The events in this excellent film occur almost completely in the confines of a small town radio station. Disgraced shock jock Grant Mazzy and his beleaguered producer, Sidney Briar, field reports of escalating violence as it spreads, mouth to mouth, through the Ontario countryside. At one point early, a local music group called “Lawrence and the Arabians” — in full on brown face — shows up to sing a song or somesuch, which is the exact kind of folksy local color which Mazzy considers himself way too good for. (The Lawrence of the Arabians is none other than Tony Burgess, who wrote both the screenplay and the novel the film is based on.) The group also includes two children, who are identified in imdb as Maureen and Colleen, though I’m not certain their names are ever used in the film. Either way, they appear later in the film having succumbed to the language virus, and Mazzy and Sidney have to push past them to lock themselves in the relative safety of the utility closet slash break room.

I don’t think these zombie kids perform a specific narrative function — not like a lot of the other named undead children in this list — but I do think they are purposefully in the narrative. I’ve read a fair amount of Burgess’s novels, and many of them deal with outbreaks of civic violence and “people suddenly being absolutely not what you think they are.” These stories are largely set in the tiny towns in rural Ontario where he lives, and this convulsive violence often occurs in those liminal spaces we pass through in our rote and somnambulant interactions with the quote-unquote community: a gas station at a crossroads, a parking lot outside a big box store, a diner. Kids are just there, because kids are always just there: in the back seat while mom pumps gas, hanging onto the cart while mom distractedly shops, or, in Pontypool, going along with dad’s dog-and-pony show to get on the local radio. Violence inevitably affects children, and that violence doesn’t necessarily have meaning; it just is. There are zombie kids in Pontypool because there are kids in the town of Pontypool; as above, so below.

Quarantine (2008)

Briana

Probably a little bit of a cheat, because Quarantine is the American remake of [REC], so I’ll just note the differences. Quarantine only has one zombie child, Briana (played by a tiny baby Joey King), who is basically the same character as Jennifer Carmen, down to attacking her own mother. The source of the illness is no longer Vatican demon possession, but a doomsday cult member (played by none other than Doug Jones!) stealing a genetically modified rabies virus and releasing it in the apartment building. This localization makes perfect sense to me, as Americans are much more millenarian and paranoid about the gumment and have a different relationship with the Catholic church than the Spanish.

Zombieland (2009)

An entire birthday party

We only see child zombies in Zombieland during Cincinnati’s enumeration of his rules, specifically number 4: seatbelts. They end up being a visual punchline more than anything (and, weirdly, the same visual punchlines as in a The Walking Dead webisode called “Torn Apart”): they’re children zombified during a child’s birthday party. A somewhat dowdy woman with bad hair jumps into her van and frantically rolls up the window while while zombies in party dresses bang on the windows. She peels out of this suburban subdivision overrun with child zombies while Jesse Eisenberg intones that one must repress all humanity to survive zombieland. (The bouncy house in the background is a nice touch, tbh.) When she’s clear of the child zombies, her attention is drawn to one of the dozens of beanie babies all over the dash, at which point she t-bones a truck and is launched through the window, which presumably kills her. It would probably be easy to overthink this because I don’t think there’s much to this other than the macabre humor of girls in princess dresses trying to kill you. I do think the woman’s characterization — such as it is, as it’s limited to dowdy clothes, a bad haircut, and a weird relationship with plushies — evinces a sort of mean-spiritedness which has made Zombieland not age all that well. Cincinnati’s incel vibes are impossible to ignore now, for example.

The Girl with All the Gifts (2014)

Melanie

This is one of the four movies that have classrooms full of zombies — the others being Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Little Monsters, and Cooties. I said I wasn’t going to include them here, but Melanie is such a distinct character that I’m making an exception for her. The film (based on the same-named novel by M. R. Carey) takes place 10-ish years after the zombie apocalypse has overtaken Britain. Like The Last of Us, the zombie pathogen is fungal in nature. In an installation outside of the main human settlement, the military is experimenting on a dozen or so zombie children they have captured out in the wild. Unlike children turned in the initial outbreak, these children are capable of instruction, and don’t pose a threat to regular people as long as the living remain slathered in a scent-blocker. These children are strapped down and wheeled into a classroom every day, presided over by the empathetic Miss Justineau.

The film largely focuses on the relationship between Miss Justineau and her zombie student, Melanie. (The film also reverses the racial dynamic that was in the book: Melanie is Black and Miss Justineau white, which I think is a more interesting dynamic, Pedagogy of the Oppressed-style.) After the installation is inevitably breached, Melanie, Justineau and a collection of soldierly types end up road tripping through a zombified Britain. They encounter even more zombie children who have clearly self-organized into a sort of community, but they lack language & anything but the most rudimentary culture. Melanie ends up annihilating the human race by making the zombie plague airborne, while preserving it through Miss Justineau, who ends up the instructor of an entirely new race of people.

When zombie stories include children, they can potentially comment on generational conflict — and zombie classrooms, doubly so. Looking at this film post-Brexit and Britain’s continuing self-sabotage, you can see all of that coming. Glenn Close’s character, the military general in charge of the installation, is absolutely furious that people like Melanie exist, and prioritizes destroying her over even self-preservation. Humanity is dead. Long live humanity.

What We Become (Original Danish title: Sorgenfri) (2015)

Maj

Unlike many zombie movies, What We Become focuses on a nuclear family, not a found family, and it largely takes place in the family home. The zombie apocalypse itself is a pretty slow burn: The dynamics between the family members and the larger community (most specifically, their neighbors) are very carefully detailed. (The nuclear family consists of parents Dino and Pernille, and their kids are Gustaf, who seems like he’s 17-18, and Maj, who’s probably around 10.) During this extended prelude, there are constant background events, which, for someone paying attention, presage the zombie apocalypse. An elderly neighbor disappears; the radio mentions a virus centered in their suburb. Interestingly, I’m not sure the family even sees a zombie before the military rolls in and forces everyone to quarantine in their homes. (The plastic sheeting reminded me strongly of [REC], with people trapped in their homes and subject to escalating civic violence.)

The beginning of What We Become is also its ending. The very first scene is a distraught Pernille whispering platitudes to someone offscreen: Everything is going to be alright; it’s all a dream, etc. She reacts to banging, “Dino, is that you?” We see this scene again with much more context at the very end of the film. Pernille has retreated to an attic bedroom. Her daughter, Maj, is dead; this is who she is cradling in her arms. Her husband Dino is indeed the one banging on the door, which he breaks down. He shoulders a rifle with a scope and tells her to move away from the girl. She refuses. Looking down, she sees Maj open her eyes. A moment of hope flashes on Pernille’s face before she’s bitten and killed by her daughter. Dino points the gun first at Maj, and then at himself, but he’s out of bullets. Maj attacks and kills him as well.

In the particulars, the demise of the child, her reanimation, and then deaths of the parents isn’t dissimilar from Karen Cooper and her parents in Night of the Living Dead. The key difference is that the focus of the film has been on this nuclear family though the whole film. The Coopers are emblematic of the American nuclear family on the rotten end of the 60s; Maj and her family are less emblems and more distinct characters.

Blood Quantum (2019)

Unnamed girl

As far as I know, Blood Quantum is the first and only First Nations zombie film. The action of the film takes place in and around the fictional Mi’kmaq reserve of Red Crow. In a telling metaphor, Native people are immune to the virus which causes zombiism, but they can still be torn apart by their white zombie neighbors. As graffiti scrawled on the doors of the refuge says: If they’re red, they’re dead. If they’re white, they bite. After an extended prologue which takes place in the days just as the outbreak is beginning, we skip forward to 6 months into the zombie apocalypse. The reserve is one of the very few places not overrun with the undead.

The film follows brothers — the fuckup Lysol and his earnest much younger brother Joseph. Joseph and his pregnant white girlfriend have been bringing people from the outside into the reserve, and in the scene establishing the new normal, they return with a middle-aged white guy carrying his daughter in a blanket. Lysol and Joseph get into it: Lysol doesn’t want any more mouths to feed, and points out the daughter is obviously infected. The father denies this, but Lysol pulls down the blanket she’s wrapped in to reveal a bite. Joseph and his girlfriend get high and mighty about helping people, and tensions run over into a scuffle, just in time for their father, Traylor (played by the wonderful Michael Greyeyes) to wade in and bust up the fight. Tribal members discuss what to do about the infected girl in their native language, which increasingly upsets the father, who begins shouting, “Speak English!” Meanwhile, the girl dies. The father is ushered into the reserve, but his daughter cannot be taken inside. Just as she begins to stir, Traylor spits her skull with an axe.

Blood Quantum is so very much about the colonial relationship, and the confrontation at the gates of the reserve throw a lot of complicated interrelations together. Lysol is increasingly violently retaliatory as the movie goes on, but in this situation, he’s absolutely not wrong about the need to be cautious about letting people in. Joseph’s white girlfriend huffs at him, “We’re supposed to be helping people!” which feels whiney and entitled in the moment. Interestingly, it’s the level-headed Traylor who shoots back, “We’re not supposed to be doing anything. We’re supposed to survive.” White refugees trying to get into a First Nation — which typically were placed in land unwanted by white people — is an ironic reversal. Building on that central irony, this scene layers irony on irony — everything from the white father demanding they speak English while requesting asylum in their nation, to the white refugees being referred to as “boat people.” Most zombie movies end on bummers, but Blood Quantum is much more open-ended bummer than most.

Zombi Child (2019)

There is not actually a zombie child in Zombi Child. I suspect it may be a translation problem, as this francophone film deals with the legacy of colonialism in France through the story of a Haitian man turned zombie in the 1960s intercut with a contemporary story of a Haitian girl going to a boarding school in France. Haiti is, of course, the source for the original zombie lore, a creature which functions more like a golem under the control of a sorcerer than the undead cannibalistic mobs we see from Romero on. Thought I should address the film, given the name and all.

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021)

Girl in the road, neighbor boy

I know that no one saw this reboot of films based on the Resident Evil video games — which heretofore have been closely associated with Milla Jovovich and Paul W. S. Anderson — but I thought it was ok. Too reliant on dark-o-vision which made most of the action muddy, but with way more fidelity to the video games, if that’s your bag. (I know some of the game fans were unhappy with the previous series because those movies take a lot of liberties.) Anyway, Welcome to Raccoon City follows the initial outbreak in the titular city due to Umbrella Corp’s fuckery. Claire Redfield returns home to Raccoon City to warn her rookie RCPD brother, Chris, about the Umbrella Corp’s evil experiments.

When the trucker she’s hitching a ride with decides to make a gross pass at her, his attention wanders and he hits a girl in the road with his truck. (I couldn’t quite clock her age; it’s possible this is a teenager.) While he and Claire are arguing about what to do about the body, the girl gets up and wanders into the forest, where she stands, just out of sight, being a creeper. On her way to her brother’s house, Claire has several weird encounters with townspeople doing stuff like bleeding from the eyes. This culminates in Claire seeing a mother and son next door to her brother’s who appear to be bleeding and loosing clumps of hair. Chris is like, whatever, I’m not interested in your conspiracy facts, and leaves her to go to work. Claire hears a noise, and discovers the boy looking real rough and hiding under Chris’s table. “Do you need help?” She asks. “You need help,” he responds, as his mother, in full on zombie mode, crashes through the glass door and attacks Claire.

When I rewatched, I was surprised how little screen time the second zombie child had — in my mind he was the one who attacked Claire, not his mom. It’s possible I got this sequence messed up with the one in Night of Comet, which has similar blocking. I admit this kid isn’t completely zombified yet, though he’s clearly well on his way. Both the child zombies in Raccoon City seem to be children for their uncanny creepy factor mostly. But the children are also emblematic of the moral depravity of Umbrella, and by extension, the entire town. The population of the orphanage where the Redfields were raised was a convenient source for disposable test subjects, and the unnaturalness of preying upon your own young comes to full concrete metaphor with the death and reanimation of the town.


So that’s what I’ve got! Judging from this list, the most common child zombie is a white girl who will kill her mother in the story. I don’t really have a theory as to why that is the case, though it may just be as simple as children are often with their mothers, and a white girl is the avatar for imperiled innocence. And hey, if you can think of other zombie children I missed, I’d be happy to add them.

The Last of Us: Infected

The trouble with being a week (or more) behind on my self-assigned reviewing project is that I was happily doing some thinking about “Infected”, the second episode of The Last of Us, when I got hit with episode three, “Long Long Time”, which is serious gut-punch. The latter is the kind of story that post-apocalyptic narratives are uniquely suited to tell — strip out society and focus hard on fragile, beautiful human connection — but, for whatever reason, doesn’t. So. I’m going to do my best to muddle through some thoughts about “Infected”, but know that my heart isn’t quite in it because Frank and Bill broke it.

One thing I didn’t mention when talking about the pilot episode was the cold open. The entire series opens on a 1960s talk show panel discussing one of the panelist’s new book, something apparently about the dangers of infectious disease in the age of air travel, and the prospect of a pandemic. I was rueful when one scientist talked about how a disease could move from one side of the globe to the other “in a matter of weeks” — surely it’s faster than that now — but then I realized that Covid-19 did indeed take weeks, sometimes months, to get all around the globe, infection rates and incubation periods being what they are. I was just talking to a family member about the beginning of the pandemic, and Minneapolis shut down on the Ides of March — March 15. We weren’t locked down here, at the top of Lake Superior 200 miles away, until the day after St Patrick’s Day — March 19. Four days, 200 miles. This is all a jillion times faster than when the Black Plague landed in Europe, in Italy, in 1347, and took almost five years to travel to northern Russia.

Then the other epidemiologist (played by the charming John Hannah) chimes in: I’m not scared of viruses or bacteria, he says, what really worries me is fungus. He then goes on to describe in loving and terrifying detail what the cordyceps fungus does to ants. The whole vibe of the room changes. The audience goes from laughing at the moderator’s stupid jokes to watching in stony silence as he talks about the annihilation of the entire human race. It’s a pretty great opening, because while obviously it’s there to infodump how the zombie pathogen works in this story, it also seeks to disarm an audience which is weary of pandemics in general, and zombies in specific. I did it myself while watching: yes, yes, we all know how air travel will change the way diseases move through the population; you sweet summer children have no idea. Hannah’s little monologue really gets into the terror of the fungal infection — being piloted and replaced by an alien while you remain locked in your own body — while explaining to a pandemic-weary modern audience why we should sit up and take notice.

The cold open in the second episode doesn’t so much explain as illustrate, profoundly and horribly, how this fungal zombie infection is Not Your Daddy’s Zombie Virus. We open in Jakarta two days before the opening of the first episode. An older woman — a mycologist — is having lunch at a café when some cop-types escort her to … well, it’s not entirely clear. A government facility? There is a split second showing a sign giving advice about how to deal with SARS, which definitely dates the proceedings. She’s shown a slide of something which they claim came from a human, but she pushes back: cordyceps cannot infect people. She’s then sent into a pressure-negative clean room to inspect a body. She cuts near a bite mark on the body’s ankle, which reveals fibrous strands, not the usual blood and muscle. When she opens the cadaver’s mouth, fungal spores reach out, straining in the air towards her. She reels out of the room, clearly horrified almost to the point of panic.

This actress did such an amazing job. Like most of the audience for The Last of Us, I don’t speak Indonesian, so she had to convey her emotional state through body language and her carefully expressive face. You can see it all: her confusion and fear when she’s picked up, which segues to a casual professional confidence when she snaps into scientist mode. So when we see her shakily drinking tea and quietly, calmly suggesting they should firebomb Jakarta, you know exactly how fucked up everything is. Like the 1960s talk show, this isn’t really telling us anything new, except in the minutia. We’ve seen the clickers at work in the pilot, and we’ve already gotten the scientific rundown. There was some mention of flour mills in Jakarta in the first episode, so this is a confirmation of that location as ground zero for the infection. But this sequence put a face on what could be dry facts: This pathogen is so terrifying an expert in mycology suggested firebombing her hometown. Even then, she knows it’s not going to work, and asks to be returned home, so she can spend what little time she has left with her family. Oof.

After the cold open of second episode, the narrative continues with Tess, Joel, and Ellie outside of the Boston QZ, moving towards a meeting with the Fireflies so Joel and Tess can pass off Ellie, and move onto whatever bullshit they have going on. This part of the episode definitely had the feel of a video game. Encounter an impediment; work around the impediment. Tess and Joel discuss going the long way or the short way. The long is, of course, the safer. There’s a fair amount of crawling over things and working around obstacles, like the kind of thing you’d find in a video game. They inevitably end up going the short way after the long way proves blocked; the short way is through the Bostonian Museum, a (fictional) museum which appears to be about colonial Boston. We get our first up-close look at a clicker who’s been overtaken by the fungus for years, and these zombies are definitely residents of the Uncanny Valley, their faces covered with mushroom frills, blind, and smelling. Their blindness makes them seem less worrisome than your usual Romero-style zombie — stay silent and out of the way — but once they hone in on your location, they are significantly harder to kill. We also get some important exposition about the clickers. Apparently those fungal fucks are connected underground, so that if you disturb the wrong thing, it’ll pluck the unseen network like a spider’s web, and draw clickers from miles around down on your location. (Surely this won’t be necessary information later.)

Ellie is alive with wonder and curiosity about the world outside the QZ, and fascinated by the remnants of a modern world she has never lived in. Sometimes recklessly so: She tells them she was infected with cordyceps when she broke into a mall which had been declared off limits. (She also claims she was alone, and that is surely a lie. As I mentioned in my first post, I don’t have knowledge of the game to fall back on, but seriously. No one underlines how alone they were in fiction unless they weren’t.) Ellie’s delight with the world, even the ravaged, decaying parts, is in contrast with Joel & Tess’s world-weariness and trauma. I find this is a common tension in zombie narratives (and post-apocalyptic stories more in general): the new generation, the one born after the death of the modern world, has very different instincts than that one who watched that world die. Boston isn’t a cenotaph for Ellie, not a marker for the death of modernity, and modernity itself is something between a tall tale and a myth.

So. A totally decent episode which was more about setting up necessary exposition than hard-core interpersonal interactions. I mentioned Colson Whitehead’s Zone One last week, how he builds a taxonomy of survivor recollection. The Silhouette is for people who you don’t intend to be with very long, just a simple sketch of where and when. The Anecdote is for more long-term of one’s short-term companions; this recounting will get deeper into details. The Obituary is the real story, with blood, snot, and tears. The last episode was Joel’s Obituary. It showed us who he lost and how utterly devastating that was. In this episode, he barely, barely, gives Ellie a Silhouette. She asks him not very intrusive questions — the kind of thing you’d ask someone in a waiting room — and he answers “pass” to more than a couple. Given his resolve to stick with her at the end, it’ll be interesting to see him thaw towards the more intimate modes of recollection — and she him.

The Last of Us: When You’re Lost in the Darkness

However many years ago (many), I diligently rounded up every The Walking Dead episode as it aired. It was in the doldrums of season 3, so I did a lot of bitching, but it was still a fun exercise. I know I’m super bad at follow-through when I assign myself homework, but I’m going to make a stab at it with HBO’s newest zombie show, The Last of Us. Already I’m off to a great start, because it’s been a solid week since the show premiered, and they’ve already aired episode two. But to begin my chatting about the first episode, I’m going to make some disclaimers and talk about zombie tv, ok? Ok.

The Last of Us, like The Walking Dead, is based on preexisting media, this time a video game instead of comics. I had read up to the second compendium with The Walking Dead — roughly when the prison is breached — but I don’t have that kind of background here. I’ve never played the game, so I don’t have any particular feelings about this casting choice or that. I do know that the usual suspects are mad about Black people existing and whatnot, but those types can dry up and blow away. I’m going to take the individual performances as they are, and not as some perfect 1:1 version of the video game. I totally get having things in your head if you’re familiar with a specific narrative, but that’s not where I’m coming from. Moreover, perfect fidelity to source material is not my metric for success. One of my favorite film adaptions of a book — and, coincidentally, another zombie narrative — is Pontypool, based on the novel Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess. The film uses only one of the intertwining plotlines in the novel — which are alluded to in brief, weird interludes — because an attempt to portray everything that happens would get diffuse quick. The narrative’s simplicity makes it a stronger film.

So. The opening of The Last of Us is very much what Colson Whitehead, in Zone One, described as the Last Night. It’s the last day of normalcy before the world falls away and everything changes. As the wry narrator in that novel observes: “At their core, Last Night stories were all the same: They came, we died, I started running.” Whitehead’s ironic dismissal is a sort of inversion of Chekhov’s old saw from Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The unhappy beginning of any zombie story is the same: they came, we died, etc. I say ironic, because however distanced the reader is by narrative bracketing or other literary tricksiness, those Last Night stories are individually, personally gutting. Every Last Night story is about someone losing everything, often violently. That zombie stories flatten this trauma to some snatched keys and a locked bathroom door speaks to the emotionally insulating power of the genre trope, something writers have to consciously write against.

We first meet Joel and his daughter Sarah on the morning of his birthday. Sarah’s got all the poise of a child who’s had to keep things together because her parents won’t — or can’t. The mother is absent — I presume dead because there are still pictures of her in the house — and Joel seems to work too much. He promises he’ll be back in time for them to celebrate his birthday, but this is inevitably not the case. We then follow Sarah through her day: she goes downtown to fix a watch with (unknown) special significance; she visits with the neighbors she finds affectionately annoying. During these mundane tasks, there’s this thrum of disquiet. The wife of the man who fixes her watch hustles her out of the store, telling Sarah to get home before she hurriedly closes up. In one of the more unsettling scenes in the pilot, the catatonic grandma at her neighbors’ goes through unnatural facial contortions, but we only see this out of focus behind Sarah’s turned back. Sirens blare in the distance constantly.

This opening does such a good job of showing a normal that is just on the edge. Sarah keeps listening too long at things in the distance, or seeming watchful in moments that aren’t overtly wrong. A nice detail: when her father eventually turns up, he remarks that she finally locked the door, something she apparently never does. A lot of Last Night narratives don’t linger much in the moments Before. A good example would be Zach Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake, which has the heroine witness the bloody murder and reanimation of her husband in the first minutes, then never much fusses with her grief; indeed, I don’t believe he’s mentioned again. But The Last of Us almost gives us an Obituary, in Whitehead’s taxonomy of Last Night narratives: a tale told to the intimate, with a full accounting of the loss. The other two possible modes are the Silhouette, for those to whom no connection was felt, and the Anecdote, suitable for large groups and the more long-term of the short-term traveling companions. (These distinctions will come in handy when talking about how Ellie and Joel interact, later.)

The day winds down quietly. They have cake and fall asleep in front of the tv watching a movie borrowed from the neighbors. This peaceful tableau is interrupted by a call from Joel’s brother, Tommy. Tommy’s gotten himself thrown in jail in Houston for assaulting someone, and Joel goes to bail him out, leaving a sleeping Sarah. She wakes up later to the sound of helicopters and distant booms. When she goes next door to investigate why their dog is out, she finds a blood-soaked kitchen with grandma feasting on her daughter’s body. Joel and Tommy return and order her into the truck, at which point they race off, trying to get out of the city. In their mad dash out of the city, there’s all manner of unsettling shit going on, but just over there, and then you’re past it. When Sarah is eventually killed — you can see this coming a mile away — it’s at the hands of a soldier, not one of the “clickers” (as the zombies here are styled.) He clearly gets orders to kill the two civilians over his walkie, shooting at them as they run away. This sets the themes for the rest of the episode: the government cannot be trusted, and only people working through mutual aid and community organizing are going to get anything done.

The narrative skips ahead 20 years; the location is now Boston. We don’t immediately catch up with Joel. Instead, we follow an unkempt and dirty child as he makes his way through the wreckage of modernity. I immediately got all excited because I’ve been working on a catalogue of zombified children, and this kid seemed stumbling and glazed enough to register as infected, if not a full-blown zombie. He’s allowed into the Boston FEDRA QZ (Federal Disaster Response Agency and Quarantine Zone, respectively) but strapped down to a wheelchair, The Girl with All the Gifts style. A woman speaks gently to him while he’s given a shot. We catch up with Joel after this sequence: He’s loading bodies into a pyre when a woman working alongside him balks at putting a child in the fire. It’s the boy from earlier; he must have been euthanized. I suspected that was what happened, but now I know, and without a lot of arm-wheeling. There’s a lot of nicely compact storytelling going on without a lot of fuss, like government-style posters on the wall which explain how the location of bite relates to infection time, or the fact that government is now conducted on scraps of paper and a stamp.

We follow Joel through his day. He lines up work for the next, talks to a guard who turns a blind eye to his smuggling, and tries to contact his brother, who is apparently the other half of the supply chain. Tommy’s been radio silence for longer than usual, and it’s making him and his girlfriend Tess nervous. Along the way we get a good cross-section of life in the QZ. The FEDRA administration of the QZ is apparently dystopian enough to have an organized resistance against them, a group called the Fireflies. When a deal of Joel’s falls through, he ends up grudgingly agreeing to take a young girl to a Firefly location outside of the QZ, at which point he’ll have what he needs to find his brother. This marks Bella Ramsey’s entrance into the narrative. I sincerely love a foul-mouthed sass, and Ellie’s character is that plus some. The Fireflies believe she’s important, though the not so hidden football is that they believe she’s the key to a cure. (There will be more on this later.)

On their way out of the QZ, they come in conflict with the guard Joel is friendly with. This confrontation was similar enough to Joel’s run-in with the soldier who murdered his daughter to trigger a pretty healthy rage response. He ends up beating the guard to death, while Ellie looks on in horrified wonder. Everyone completely does their jobs here, especially Ramsey, who manages to convey a lot of complex emotion. Joel’s violence on her behalf registers almost as a form of affection: he is willing to kill to protect her. I’ve often said that violence nurtures domesticity in zombie narratives, often paradoxically, and that’s not always or often a good thing. Largely this takes the form of white men murdering folk because of some high-handed ideal which crumbles the minute you look past the soundbite (pun intended). But here it’s much more nuanced than most. Ellie and Joel both have their motivations, which ultimately lock together. He’s still grieving a daughter; she’s never had a parent, let alone baseline affection from the adults around her. They don’t lock together here in the first episode — that would give short shrift to their very real trauma — but you can see how they might.

All in all, I was well pleased with the beginnings of this story. My kid, who is a video game nerd, was a little dismissive when I asked him if he’d watched this. “The video game is trying to be a movie,” he said, “so it makes sense the adaption would work.” While that definitely gave me food for thought about the aims of both genre and medium, it didn’t crimp my enjoyment. Inevitably, the take-home is that mushrooms are fucked up, a sentiment I can get behind.

The Year in Reading: 2022

I rounded up the books I’d read for the year a couple years back, which I hoped to make into something of a tradition. Alas, I’ve never done well when I assign myself homework, so last year went by without a roundup. But I guess I’m back! We’ll see how this goes. I’m still pretty focused on lighter fare, like I was at the start of the pandemic, but I’ve managed to slip in some horror here and there, mostly stuff I’d read already. In fact, I did a lot of rereading this year; I’m just not interested in surprises. So, without further ado:

Stuff I read for class:

The Collected Works of T.S. Eliot. If you weren’t aware, I finally finished up the English degree I started eleventy million years ago. The class itself was a senior seminar style class — where your grade is based on a single, bigass paper — and the class was called “T. S. Eliot and War.” We started with the WWI poets — Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, &c — and then worked our way into Prufrock, The Wasteland, and the Four Quartets. It’s been a hot minute since I seriously read poetry, so it was very rewarding to get hip deep in the one of the most important poets of the 20th Century. I’m not sure who this is attributed to, but one pithy take on Eliot goes: Modernism begins between the second and third lines of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham. A small town gets knocked out by an unidentified force, after which it turns out all the women of childrearing age are knocked up. A comedy of manners that ends on a bang.

Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. This novel defies the wisdom that you shouldn’t have too much weird stuff going on in a novel, because first up, almost everyone on earth is blinded by a celestial event, and then, while society is breaking down and everything is a mess, giant, ambulatory, carnivorous plants start preying on the survivors. Fun fact: Alex Garland lifted the opening of Triffids, which follows a patient who was convalescing in hospital & who doesn’t know about the recent cataclysm, for 28 Days Later.

The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. O.G. alien invasion narrative, which reads really weird now. Published in 1897, it pre-dates both world wars, and it shows. My paper ended up being on what Wyndham took from Wells when he wrote his own alien invasion narrative, fifty years and two world wars later.

Hidden Wyndham by Amy Binns. As far as I know, the only biography of Wyndham available, published in the last few years. I feel like Wyndham is experiencing a little bitty renaissance, because he is so much more interesting than many of his peers. Hidden Wyndham publishes just scads of his letters to the love of his life while they were separated by the war, and I admit I cried.

The History of Science Fiction by Adam Roberts. I also read a lot of academical stuff for the paper, but I’m not going to bore you with psychoanalytic takes on mid-century scifi or whatnot. I mention The History of Science Fiction because I read around for sections which dealt with my specific topics, and hit a three page analysis of The Midwich Cuckoos which was better than every other bit of criticism I’d read about that novel by a country mile. I made a mental note to get back to his fiction when I remember; Roberts is also a science fiction writer himself. I recommend following his twitter if you’re into extremely erudite dad jokes and multi-lingual puns.

Zombies!

Most of my zombie reads were rereads, so we’ll start with the new stuff.

Love, Lust, and Zombies: Short Stories edited by Mitzi Szereto. Short story collection about people banging the undead. Look, I know. Would you believe I read it for the articles? I do think it’s notable, given the burgeoning subgenre of monsterotica, that zombies almost never are portrayed as fuckable, a paradox of the zombie’s curious detachment and their voraciousness. Something something, quip about the little death and the big one.

The Down Home Zombie Blues by Linnea Sinclair. Turns out, not actually about zombies, which I found incredibly disappointing. Buddy-cop alien-invasion narrative with hive-mind space chthulu, set in Florida. Make of that what you will.

Everything Dies by T. W. Malpass. I read the first “season”; this is apparently some kind of serial. Decent, but it’s got the wordiness of serials and the tendency to jump around in a way that works when you’re consuming something episodically, but not so much in a binge. I’m on the fence about whether to continue.

The First Thirty Days by Lora Powell. Self-pub with the requisite typos and infelicities, but stronger than most. Kinda not into the fact that a vaccine is responsible for the zombie apocalypse. Given the pub date, this isn’t Covid vaccine denialism, just the regular kind, but it still rankles. I liked the slow collection of survivors; I didn’t like the cartoony bad guys in the third act. I also enjoyed that these zombies were fast zombies initially, but as they decomposed, they got more like the shamblers of yore. Not that physics exists in zombie stories, but I liked that these zombies decomposed like bodies would.

This is Not a Test by Courtney Summers. YA novel about a young woman who is suicidal when the zombie apocalypse hits, and ends up riding it out in the high school with a collection of frenemies. There’s a real thing that depressed people tend to do better in crisis situations, because they’ve been catastrophizing the whole time so sure, why not zombies. Beautifully written and worth the reread.

Severance by Ling Ma. Legit, I reread this almost exclusively because I watched the AppleTV series, Severance (no relation). This novel definitely cemented my opinion that zombie novels more accurately capture the experience of living through a pandemic than fiction about pandemics. This lappingly memoirish novel follows a post-college millennial through a global outbreak of Shen fever, which strips its victims down to one rote action until they die of exposure or malnutrition. She keeps working her publishing job as New York empties, masked and Zooming with a smaller and smaller group of people.

Zone One by Colson Whitehead. This is maybe the third time I’ve read this, second time I’ve listened to the audio, which is very good. Once you get past the 50c words and the complex syntax — not to mention how aggressively deadpan the narrative voice is — Zone One is seriously freaking funny. It’s honestly become one of my favorite novels. Zone One is also elegiac about a lost New York, like Severance, and is probably best understood as a 9/11 novel, of sorts.

The Dark Earth by John Hornor Jacobs. Another super rewarding reread. Jacobs isn’t reinventing the zombie wheel here — they’re pretty standard shamblers — but this book really cemented a lot of my early ponderings about the American instinct towards fascism, what zombie stories tend to say about domesticity, etc. The way the story is told through interlocking perspectives is absolutely aces, and there’s a sequence with a steam train which rules.

Seanan McGuire

The InCryptid Series. McGuire is seriously seriously prolific, so if you’re looking for three dozen novels or so because you’ve got a long weekend, look no further. I read the first four InCryptid books — Discount Armageddon, Midnight Blue-Light Special, Half-Off Ragnarok, and Pocket Apocalypse (I was today years old when I got the pun the title; the novel takes place in Australia), but I bounced off the fifth, Chaos Choreography. This is notable, because it usually takes me two books to run out steam with a series and have to take a break. InCryptid features a sprawling family of cryptozoologists (some of whom happen to be cryptids themselves). The first was published in 2012, and it isn’t so different from the glut of urban fantasy published in the 2010s, but they get weirder and more McGuire-like as they go on, which is cool to watch happen.

Wayward Children. I continued my read of Wayward Children with Down Among the Sticks and Bones, Beneath the Sugar Sky, and In an Absent Dream. I can’t recommend this series enough. It’s a sort of meta-portal fantasy, and the plots have the logic of dreams and nightmares. In an Absent Dream is absolutely gutting so I had to take a break, but I’ll be back.

Mira Grant. I also read a couple of her novels published under the Mira Grant name, which I think largely she uses for her more science horror stuff, but who even knows. Alien Echo is a YA novel set in the Alien universe. Olivia and Viola are the twin daughters of xenobiologists whose colony gets overrun with xenomorphs. Totally decent tie-in novel. Kingdom of Needle and Bone has a similar vibe to the Newsflesh books, which I enjoyed greatly despite my often loud bitching. Unfortunately, the book is about a pandemic, and I am not capable of reading about pandemics right now. I suspect this was supposed to be the start of a series, but Covid put an end to that, along with so much else. Oh, and speaking of that, I am absolutely dying for another killer mermaids book, like Into the Drowning Deep, but I think there might be some fuckery with the publisher? I really hope they get that nonsense worked out.

Ann Aguirre

Galactic Love. I’ve found my way working through Aguirre’s back catalogue because she’s a rock solid journeyman writer who is often quietly subversive as hell, especially when it comes to toxic genre tropes. Like in the first of her Galactic Love series, Strange Love, Aguirre takes on alien abduction romance, a sub-genre which is often a trash fire of dub-con and dudes with weird dicks. Strange Love is instead a charming, funny story with a talking dog and a Eurovision-ish contest, and the alien doesn’t even have a dick. This year I read the third, Renegade Love, which isn’t as great as Strange Love, but is still pretty great. It’s about a froggy dude in a murder suit, what more could you possibly need to know?

Mirror, Mirror. Mirror, Mirror is the second in her Gothic Fairytales series, after Bitterburn. I really enjoyed the Beauty & the Best retelling in Bitterburn, even if the end fizzled a bit, but I feel like Mirror, Mirror, which takes on Sleeping Beauty (sort of), was a misfire. The novel’s protagonist is the step-mother, and while I appreciated the attempt at inverting the tropes — it’s the mother that’s evil, not the step-mother — I don’t think the novel really gets under the hood of what those tropes say about motherhood, etc. The novel instead just relabels the good mom and the bad one.

Grimspace. The first in the Sirantha Jax novels about an FTL pilot who gets pinned as the patsy in some galactic political fuckery. Peripatetic space opera which moves pretty fast. The main character sometimes annoyed me with the gormlessly naïve thing that is common to this kind of protagonist, but still a totally decent novel.

Witch Please. Bounced off this hard, but then I have close to zero patience for contemporary romance, which this is. Just including it because Aguirre writes in a lot of different genres, which I think is nifty, even if they’re not to my taste.

Jessie Mihalik

I discovered Mihalik some time in October, and I’ve been tearing through her books. Incredibly fast-moving space operas, often with labyrinthine galactic court drama and some light kissing. The Consortium Rebellion series — Polaris Rising, Aurora Blazing and Chaos Reigning — just keep getting better, partially because I think she stops relying on tropes and types so hard. (Like one of the characters in Polaris Rising is 100% Riddick with the serial numbers filed off). Too be clear: tropes and types are what makes a genre, so I’m not slagging this, just observing. The first two of the Starlight’s Shadow series, Hunt the Stars and Eclipse the Moon, have a Vulcan-y psychic race which I am totally into, but I think the books are occasionally hamstrung by their first person narrators, especially the first. I’m reading The Queen’s Advantage, the second of the Rogue Queen series right now. The first, The Queen’s Gambit, has an Amadala-type elected queen, which is silly, but then mostly she’s queen so the title works, which is whatever. They’re all superfun books, and if you’re looking to while away an attack of insomnia, don’t pick these up because you will never go back to sleep. Just one more chapter.

Various Series I Continued Reading

Kiss of the Spindle by Nancy Campbell Allen. Steampunky take on Sleeping Beauty, and the second in a series begun with Beauty and the Clockwork Beast. The previous novel had a really cool protagonist, but the mystery plot was almost offensively stupid. Kiss of the Spindle improves on this by having a cool protagonist, and then also the whole locked room mystery was fun to watch play out. The antagonist ended up being the most compelling character by far, and I was bummed to see the next novel in the series wasn’t about him.

Raven Unveiled by Grace Draven. The last (?) of the Fallen Empire series didn’t quite work for me. We’ve met both main characters before — Gharek of Cabast and Siora — and the novel is supposed to be a redemption arc for the former. Alas, I felt like he was too much of a jerk to be redeemed, so I was ambivalent about the novel. I will always love Draven’s prose style, but I just can’t love Gharek. (I also reread all of the Wraith Kings series, of course.)

Irin Chronicles by Elizabeth Hunter. I read the first three of the Irin Chronicles series ages ago, when PNR was in its angel phase. I loved how Hunter dealt with the concept of a mate bond. Hunter addresses a specific fucked up situation which would inevitably happen if indeed the mate bond existed in book 2 or 3 of the Irin books — can’t remember exactly. I’ve only seen one other writer address this situation (but not this well). I never continued on with the series because of my aforementioned need for series breaks, but I finally got around to reading books 6, 7 & 8, The Silent, The Storm, and The Seeker. (I skipped #4, The Staff and the Blade, because I find Damien and Sari kind of annoying.) They were all enjoyable in their own ways, but The Seeker rises to a crescendo which could serve as a series ender, if she decides not to go on.

Ruby Fever by Ilona Andrews. Perfectly cromulent conclusion to Catalina’s arc in the Hidden Legacy series. The husband and wife team behind the pen name have this tendency to rely on eugenics in their magic systems, which can flower into full-on magical fascism. (The Kate Daniels books especially are guilty of this, most egregiously in Blood Heir, which I also read this year. I did not like Blood Heir.) Fortunately, in Ruby Fever they seem to be aware of how screwed up a system based on heritable magic would be, and there’s some direct critique in the novel. Ruby Fever also showcases their trademark ability to begin a novel with three totally screwed up but seemingly unrelated situations, and then have them escalate and entwine into a massive disaster. Even if I’m not into a book of theirs, they are very, very good at what they do. (Oh also, apparently I read Fated Blades, their most recent novella in the Kinsmen Universe, a series which they started and abandoned over a decade ago. I didn’t love it, but it was fine.)

Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells. The sixth Murderbot Diaries book, Fugitive Telemetry takes place before book 5, so the timeline was a little confusing at points. I thought we were going to get a road trip with ART after the last? Anyway, fun little locked room (locked space station?) mystery, full of Murderbot’s trademark kvetching. For a series based on a bot what murders, the Murderbot Diaries are surprisingly cozy reads. Murderbot just wants to get back to its stories when other peoples’ horseshit gets in the way. Big same, Murderbot.

Last Guard by Nalini Singh. I reread a few Psy-Changeling novels this year, to better and worse results. I invariably enjoy the books which focus on two Psy as the romantic leads, because all the growling and posturing of the changelings gets real old fast. The Psy are dealing with massive trauma, on a society-wide level, and Singh never defaults to the love of a good woman (or shape-shifter, whatever) to heal the damage. Her characters are going to have to work for it. Anyway, Last Gaurd has for its protagonists two Psy with disabilities — one physical and one mental. This is notable, because the Psy have practiced an incredibly nasty form of eugenics for last 100 years. We also get a closer look at the first gay couple I’ve ever seen in the Psy-Changeling novels. I think this is probably the best of the Psy-Changeling Trinity books to date.

Dukes are Forever and From London with Love by Bec McMaster. Dukes are Forever is the conclusion to McMaster’s London Steampunk series, and it absolutely sticks the landing. The series takes place in an alt-Victorian England where the upper classes have turned into literal blood-sucking parasites due to a communicable disease which is basically vampirism. It’s not a particularly careful alt-history — if you want that from your steampunk, read Meljean Brook’s Iron Seas series instead — but it is incredibly pulpy and energetic. From London with Love is an epilogue novella, which isn’t required reading or anything, but it was a nice denouement to a series I followed for whatever dozen books.

Various One-Offs

A Lush and Seething Hell by John Hornor Jacobs. Two novellas in a cosmic horror vein. While I liked The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky, a post-traumatic wig-out set in a South American country’s slide into dictatorship and its horrific aftermath, it didn’t quite get me like My Heart Struck Sorrow, about some librarians collecting the textured horror, sorrow, and folklore of the American south. There’s an alt-history where I became a folklorist, and I deeply appreciate the porousness of the collector and the collected. Also, while there’s some eldritch stuff going on in the center of both novels, the real horror is other godamn people.

Half a Soul and Ten Thousand Stitches by Olivia Atwater. Gaslamp fantasies set in the Regency period, and really very good. Atwater has a delightful way of shifting the perspective just enough so that somewhat tired tropes become interesting again. The main character in Half a Soul reads to me as non-neurotypical, and the protagonist in Ten Thousand Stitches is a servant, of all things. Both act as pretty furious indictments of the class system — far beyond the more anodyne “it sucks to be a penniless relation” kind one can find in this sort of thing.

Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree. Baldree pinned the coziness slider all the way up on Legends & Lattes, a fantasy novel about an orc mercenary putting up her sword and opening a coffeeshop. If you’re looking for a comfort read with a focus on simple, sensual pleasures, this is the book for you. Also, there’s a huge, adorable dire cat.

Titus Groan by Melvyn Peake. Technically finished this in ’21, but I never did a round up last year, so. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is almost always invoked alongside the Gormenghast trilogy, and I can see why that is to a degree: they are both essentially English in a way I can identify but not define, and both describe a world on the knife’s edge. Both Gormenghast and Middle Earth are close to, if not wholly, a fantasy of manners, describing worlds circumscribed by the weight and the import of tradition and legend. Both end with this tightening sense of change introduced into a system which has been essentially (purportedly, nominally) changeless. Peake uses the language of apostasy to describe this coming cataclysm: the concepts of both heresy and blasphemy permeate those last chapters which detail the young Titus’s earling: the world of Gormenghast is as rule-bound as any horror novel, and often more obscene. It’s completely legible to me that someone born at the burnt end of the Edwardian era and who lived through the second world war would produce something as strange as Gormenghast — born as the old world falls away and the new one burns. All hail Titus, the 77th Earl of Gormenghast. God save us all.

Midnight Bargain by C. L. Polk. Probably the best read-alike to Midnight Bargain would be Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal: the setting is Regency-ish, but the situation is complicated by a tiny bit of magic. Beatrice Clayborn comes to Bargaining Season with her family mortgaged to the hilt to fund whatever alliance can be made through her marriage. She’s also practicing magic in secret, a magic which will be severed and suppressed by a marital collar. The metaphors at play could absolutely be too on the nose, but Polk has a Regency-level restraint and never overplays the obvious gendered (and class) dynamics. 

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. I could probably put this in the “books I read for class” category, because I peer reviewed a paper about this, Brave New World and 1984. I’d already read the other two, so I thought, what the hell. And I’m glad I did, because this book ended up being an absolute banger. Written in the Soviet Union in 1920-ish, We is THE classic dystopia; both Huxley and Orwell cribbed from Zamyatin. D-503 is an engineer in a city made of glass and organized by scare quote “rational principles” un-scare-quote. The novel itself is an epistolary, of sorts: the One State is building a generation ship to colonize and proselytize aliens, when they find them; he is writing to the as yet undiscovered aliens. He kinda reminded me of the narrator in “The Horla,” a short story by Guy de Maupassant, the way he gets more and more unhinged as the narrative progressive, the difference being that We is a satirical comedy and “The Horla” is not.

So that’s it! I probably read some other stuff I can’t remember, but this is definitely the high notes. Another year, another teetering TBR.

Book review: Love, Lust and Zombies

I’ve been doing a crap job of keeping up with ye olde blogge. Some of it is the way the pandemic screwed up my reading, sending me straight to historical romance and lighter fantasy. Fantasy I could have probably pulled out some bullshitting about: it’s close enough to my wheelhouse, if not in it entirely. Romance, less so. I don’t want to be that dilettante dabbler in a genre talking out my ass, like every Valentine’s Day column of “romantic books which aren’t romance novels because cooties” which includes motherfucking Lolita. I’m better versed now, but, judging from how often I’m out of step with other readers when I check bookface reviews, I just don’t want the grief. Sometimes reading for pleasure is just that, and I’m not going to assign myself homework out of some misbegotten sense of staying current or whatever.

That said, I’ve recently been sidling back up to my old love, horror fiction, specifically zombie fiction. I reread both Severance by Ling Ma and Zone One by Colson Whitehead. They both only get better with a reread. They’re both the kind of lapping retrospective memoirishly close-third-person which doesn’t tell their stories linear-like, so during a second pass (or third), you already have the shape of things, and can really marinate on the details.

Like my experience with rereading World War Z at the beginning of the pandemic, it was kind of alarming how prescient they were, Severance especially. Also because I’d reread Severance after watching the series of the same name (no relation), I definitely took home some millennial ruminating about the nature of work that, while I’d noticed it before, became much more foregrounded this time. Even the indefatigable Mark Spitz from Zone One, whose musings cover that storied island, New York City, more than the workaday, presses his attention to the nature of work:

Hard to believe that reconstruction had progressed so far that clock-watching had returned, the slacker’s code, the concept of weekend. It had been a humdrum couple of days, reaffirming his belief in reincarnation: everything was so boring that this could not be the first time he’d experienced it.

Colson Whitehead, Zone One

Then I started reading an anthology of zombie short stories called Zombies! Tales of the Walking Dead edited by one Stephen Jones. (Not, as I’d mistakenly thought, Stephen Graham Jones, who is a very different writer.) After reading the introduction, I was afeared Zombies! was going to be a snore-fest. I was initially rebuked by a rollicking short story by Clive Barker called “Sex, Death and Starshine”, which was both sick and delightful. But then as I trudged on, my initial fears came true. Zombies! takes a kitchen sink approach to inclusion in the collection.

While this can be sort of fun for the completist — hey I didn’t know Edgar Allan Poe wrote a zombie-ish story! called “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” — so many of the stories I encountered were dated, clumsy, or only peripherally about zombies, more in the vein of cosmic horror than the living dead. (Look, I get that arguing genre is a losing game, so I’m not going to do it, but things are about what they are about, and not other things, and cosmic horror has decidedly different concerns.) Anyway, I’ll probably hack my way through this eventually, as a completist, but it’ll be homework and not any fun.

Which brings me rather long-windedly to Love, Lust and Zombies, edited by Mitzi Szereto. I was poking around in the library catalog because I was looking for this book I know is about a thinking zombie, but couldn’t remember the name of. (It ended up being Dust by Joan Frances Turner, fyi.) My ears perked up when I saw Szereto’s name. She’s the author of The Wilde Passions of Dorian Gray, which I read a while back when I was into a bunch of literary monster mash-ups and continuations. Most of the continuations I read were kind of ok to fucking bad, but Szereto’s take on Oscar Wilde’s only novel was actually inspired. Wilde Passions is a catalog of the literary erotic, running from the Belle Epoch’s class warfare to Thomas Mann’s monastery to Anne Rice’s New Orleans, and while I don’t think it works, entirely, it’s definitely some of the most thoughtful sex writing I’ve seen in the genre.

Now, I’ve said this more than a couple times, but: my sister’s quip about vampire fiction is that “vampires are high-functioning zombies.” Which, if you read any vampire romance, feels accurate. There’s a lot of breathless description of cold, white flesh out there in vampire romance, about the intractability and immutability of the body of the immortal lover. On some level, I think this invokes deep-structure cultural ideas about the incorruptibility of sainthood. Flesh and spirit are one, and both flesh and spirit are perfectly and eternally static. Or to put it crudely, these vampiric love stories are literally about banging Jesus, the original risen dead man. Drink of my blood, eat of my flesh, &c.

After the success of Twilight and roughly one million iterations, it wasn’t a huge surprise when urban fantasy and paranormal romance trained its libido on angels and devils, beings who make this theological passion explicit. (Lest we not forget, the word passion can refer to the suffering and death of Jesus, not only sexual passion.) Since then, paranormal romance has taken on all manner of unsexy beasts, everything from ghosts to orcs to dinosaurs, but largely writers stay away from the humble zombie as a source of pants feelings. I think this is a notable lacuna — the lack of sex writing about zombies even in the gleeful perversity of monsterotica — and indicates something intractably unsexy about the walking dead, both metaphorically and physically.

I can think of two novels which attempt a romance between a living person and a zombie: Warm Bodies and Dearly, Departed. Warm Bodies ended up setting my back with its incorrect reading of Romeo & Juliet –and look I know I’m supposed to pretend that there aren’t incorrect readings, but I have something of A Thing about R&J, and I cannot listen to reason — but it’s decent, if a little dippy. Dearly, Departed is messy — it’s clearly a first novel — but it’s energetic and exuberant, which counts for a lot in my book. Obviously this worked for other people, but I could not get over the thought of these heroines making out with a decaying or desiccated corpse. And, to be fair, the courtship between the living girl and undead soldier in Dearly, Departed takes place through a wall, Paramus and Thisbe style, and is honestly emotionally affecting. Ultimately, neither novel really addresses sex anyway, maybe because of their YA designation, maybe because it’s too gross to contemplate. Which is why Love, Lust and Zombies is so fascinating: it’s dealing with sex and zombies head on.

While I joked earlier about vampires just being high-functioning zombies, that’s not actually the case, either metaphorically or practically. A zombie is characterized by its degradation, by its lack of personality and agency. By contrast, vampires are defined by the very opposite. They may both be undead, but the vampire is incorruptible, while the zombie corrupts everything it can get its teeth into. And while the rotting flesh angle may be a hard bar to clear when sex writing about zombies, the lack of agency makes actual zombie romance doubly difficult to pull off. Appetite is appetite, sure, but its tough to build sexual tension when at least one of the lovers is mindless carrion. I can think of a couple movies which feature the living fucking the dead, and it’s never the good guys wetting their wicks.

So. I checked out Love, Lust and Zombies with a swiftness, because all of this is in my wheelhouse, and hard. I’m not going to get up and ride my hobby horse about zombies, violence and domesticity just yet, but let it be read into the record that an anthology of short fiction which involves conflating the little death with the big one is right up my godamn alley. I read through the forward by Mark Onspaugh, which is good, trotting around both art history and psychology which manages a breezy profundity — no mean feat — and Szereto’s introduction, which is less good, more cringe-y Boomer joking than anything.

Without further ado, to the individual stories.

“Vanilla” by Janice Eidus

My first reaction was that I hated this fucking story, which seems to enact a bunch of stupid romance tropes in a way I find distasteful. But with some thought, it might actually be subverting said stupid romance tropes, so maybe I don’t hate its guts. A young woman who works as a librarian and characterizes herself as “vanilla” sexually falls into a relationship with a man who is surely the walking dead. He comes into the library and orders her around like an alphole, which makes her wet and compliant. By the end he announces “Vanilla is my favorite flavor” and she understands “that once he licks my vanilla clean, I will be a librarian no more”.

The librarian is a cliché romance profession, and our heroine’s protestations of vanillaness are entirely a doth protest too much situation. While it may be culturally common, I think the sexualization of dead flesh which one finds all over vampire romance is pretty freaking kinky. “Vanilla” taking that one step further and making the love interest a straight up zombie might be a cool commentary, but then it might just be an accident. Just structurally, this fetishization of dead flesh is almost inevitable when zombies and sex writing collide, and it’ll show up in a number of other stories in this anthology. Honestly, I can’t tell from the prose, which seems kinda weak, tbh. Shrug emoticon.

“In the Red Light” by A. M. Hartnett

The set-up is kind of like Romero’s third zombie movie, Day of the Dead, in which mad scientists and military personnel ‘speriment on some zombies to try to reawaken their humanity or whatever. There’s a mad scientist, a lady soldier, and a zombie called Bub. Being Romero, the zombie called Bud is basically the only character with identifiable human emotions in the whole mess; humans are the real monsters, &c. The zombie in this story is more fully cognizant than Bub, and considerably less decayed: He was a death row inmate bitten when the prison warden released the undead into the prison. There’s some kind of chip in his head to keep him from zombiing out. The lady scientist (this time a shrink) is tasked with seeing to his mental state when they’re not hacking him open to see how his guts work.

There is potentially a lot here to unpack in this scenario about the treatment of institutionalized people, how they are dehumanized by systems which see them as resources, not persons. Alas, I don’t think any of that was more than cursorily touched on. I doubly don’t think the writer fully considered the consent issues involving a therapist sleeping with someone who is both her incarcerated patient and an experimental subject. The writer avoids the usual consent problems with zombies by making the zombie fully cognizant of himself, then screws that all up by having a therapist bang her patient. Like, I get that in the zombie apocalypse, probably there’s no board to revoke her license and/or bring her up on charges, but that crosses alllll kinds of ethical lines. Not great, Bob.

“Smile” by Laura Huntley

Honestly, I don’t even get it. A young woman in the zombie apocalypse goes rambling around outside every day instead of staying holed up with other survivors. She thinks they’re a bunch of emotionally stunted losers. She’s sad she lost a sister, finds a hot zombie dude at the park who lost a daughter. They bang it out. He smiles. I think I’m supposed to take home some message about how living isn’t just surviving or somesuch, but it’s not particularly well drawn. I also have serious questions about zombie physiology, specifically how they get boners and ejaculate. It’s fine though, just a situation and not really a story. That can be ok too.

“Dead from the Waist Down” by August Kent

This one does address the boner issue! Thank the Lord. This story is kind of goofy and cute, set in a sort of monster high school attended by ghosts, zombies, vampires, harpies, and whatnot. Our zombie protagonist, Nicholas, has been pining for a vamp girl called Dani. Vamps appear to be the top of the heap, socially speaking, so Nicholas is dragged by other vamps for even looking her way. Dani is a MPDG though, so they get together at a party sort of. He’s not actually capable of getting it up, but she’s unfazed, and eventually announces to the party that they’re dating. Pretty cute little scenario, and I laughed every time the zombie narrator slagged harpies for no apparent reason. Good stuff.

“Sweeter Than to Wake” by Thana Niveau

Another strangely sweet one. A man takes his bitten, frozen wife and removes all of her internal organs, sews her mouth shut, and embalms her. Zombies (or the Woken, as they are styled here) break down just like any dead body, and he’s trying to draw out their last days together as long as he can. I’m not going to spoil the ending, but this is easily the most heartfelt, poetic, and romantic conclusion to any story in this collection. This is one of a number of stories in this collection which deal with couples where one is a zombie and one isn’t, which is probably the most emotionally fruitful scenario involving Romero-style or post-Romero zombies.

“The Wild Ones” by Erin O’Riordan

Oddball little story about a love triangle of sorts playing out in an enclave of living humans protected from the undead by a bunch of ghosts. The main pair is the community leader and her wife. The community leader wants the wife to have a baby with another survivor called Steven, so they can give hope to a demoralized and dejected community. This one felt like the kind of situation where the world-building took a back seat to the interpersonal scenario, because I have close to zero understanding of how anything works in this world, especially i/r/t ghosts. Maybe there was something there about living for the memory of the dead or something, but it wasn’t clear.

“So You Want to Date a Zombie” by Shane Vaughn

Repellent story about an unlikable asshole who goes on a dating show, and ends up getting paired with an old girlfriend, only she’s undead this time. Either misogynist or so jaundiced that I’m misreading a hatred for humanity for a hatred of women.

“Still” by Delilah Devlin

Another husband and wife trying to navigate what happens when one becomes a zombie and the other doesn’t. Felt like real emotional stakes and a legitimate dilemma. The way the couple had to evade the authorities because the husband was zombifying also felt like maybe you could read the couple as LGBT or other identities who can sometimes “pass”, but I admit it’s something of a stretch.

“The Dying Time” by E.C. Myers

Probably the stand out of the collection, as it is utterly unlike any of the other stories, its own little sealed world of strange magic. A loner blows into town just as they are are battening down for a kind of winter. He develops a tendre for the town sex worker, which she numbly thinks is naïve, sweet, and stupid as hell. This might sound bitcher than I mean it, but: This is maybe the only story in this collection which fully uses the stiletto sharpness of a short story. We are given just enough to think we understand both the world and characters: insular town, drifter, town whore. Then the very end of the story rearranges how we understand everything: world, plot, and character. It’s deftly done, almost like a fairy tale, the Grimm kind, where folk die and live on a whim, and the moral of the story is survival.

“My Zombie, My Lover” by Mitzi Szereto

I’ve generally found it to be true that if an editor contributes fiction to a collection they are editing, the story is going to be not great, and that’s the case here. The narrator lives a solitary existence in the Appalachian hills. She has a distasteful tendency to sneer at the community around her. Someone starts breaking into her house and eating her leftovers; it’s a zombie; they bang. It’s a situation, not a story, which is fine, but it’s not an interesting situation, which is not.

“Come Back to Me” by Chantal Noordeloos

Another real standout, just deeply alarming. This story deals with your old school zombie reanimated and directed by Vodoun magic, not the Romero kind which is a member of a mindless mob. A young woman whose grandmother is a Bokor (which the internet informs me is a practitioner of dark sorcery) has her heart broken by a feckless summer person (or whatever seasonal tourists are called in Louisiana.) Her grandmother gives her the means to compel his death and reanimation, with the admonishment to release him from her magic once specific conditions occur. (This is what we call in folklore a “narrative lack”, when the writer introduces conditions which will precipitate action. “Don’t feed them after midnight,” the man says, which, narratively speaking, means they will inevitably be fed after midnight.) Inevitably, she does not release her lover, and some super bad shit happens.

Like “The Dying Time, “Come Back to Me” absolutely gets right into the viscera of what animates the zombie, culturally and metaphorically speaking. I feel like a number of these stories try to tart up zombies so much they’re not even zombies anymore — there’s no guts — while these two revel in paradox of the zombie’s curious detachment and their voraciousness. Fucking great.

“Not Ready to Let Go” by Deanna K. Deavers

Another story about a couple, this time from the point of view of the dying partner spending her last moments with the man she loves, and then into her reanimation and the hungers that provokes. There was something unsettling to me about this scenario, something deeper than the obvious fucked-upedness of the situation. Maybe it was that the story was told from the zombie’s point of view? A common theme of zombie stories is the horror of the loved ones transformation from lover to killer. This can work well as a metaphor for how traumatizing it is to watch a loved one waste and die, and how our bodies ultimately betray us unto death. Death reaching out from the death bed to consume the living freaks me out, apparently. Nice.

“Night of the Lovin’ Dead” by Ashley Lister

A young woman goes with the elders of her village to perform a ritual which will conjure an undead army to protect them from a living one. She’s not sure what the ritual will be, but she’s been told it will be pleasurable, so she’s all in. Both the living and the undead end up pulling a train on her, which she’s super into. Honestly, while I was reading, I kept thinking of Men Write Women, which details the worst examples of dudes writing how women boob breastily. Like this line: “From the periphery of her vision she could see the rigid thrust of her erect nipples.” I think I speak for most breast-havers that I only notice my nips when I’m specifically checking to make sure I’m presentable. I sure as shit don’t see them from the periphery of my vision — however that’s supposed to work — while I’m walking in forest so dark I can barely see the ground I’m walking on. The entire situation was priapic male gaze nonsense, and the girl’s characterization ridiculous. No.

“Under a Perfect Sun” by Zander Vyne

“Under a Perfect Sun” concerns a group of people riding out the zombie apocalypse in the biosphere in Arizona. Before the inhabitants of the biodome figured out what was going on, one of the men is bitten. Before he turns, he locks himself in a closet and writes out detailed instructions on how to stretch food and power within the dome for as long as possible. Later, his wife has to decide whether to sleep with her zombified husband to get pregnant — apparently he’s technically still alive; it’s more of a rage virus — and if she’ll allow the other women to do the same, repopulating the planet-style. This one is the most stylistically interesting of the bunch — it skips through time and characters’ perspectives, including some epistolary passages.

This is one of two stories in this collection which deals with survivor communities grappling with questions of procreation. (“The Dying Time” also deals with pregnancy, but that is in a very different scenario.) On some level, I think this goes back to the fact that we’re kind of living through a slow-moving apocalypse right now, so an isolated community deciding whether to continue existing is going to resonate. I mean, have you seen millennial birth rates? But I think the thing to note about these stories is that both place the question of procreation solidly on the woman. Zombie stories often trade in questions of how to build and defend domesticity, but mostly it’s about how men are supposed to use violence to keep their families “safe”. (Rick Grimes is the absolute avatar of this.) So it was pretty dope to see a less 2A approach to society’s survival.

Anyway! So this was a fun little read because I have some feelings about zombies and domesticity, but this collection didn’t knock my socks off or anything. Mostly I’m glad it exists, because it’s cool to see that other people have the same dumb obsessions I do, even if we do our dumb obsessions in different ways.

Story Problems

In the evening, I work story problems with my daughter
If a teacher has 25 students, and 312 raffle tickets
How would she divide them evenly between them?
And what will be left over?
(So much will be left over)
 
I don’t even hassle my kid about how raffle tickets are bought, not given
(So much has been bought not given)
Not like the one story problem where alligators ate blueberry pie
Alligators don’t eat pie, I said, not vegetarian pie
That’s ridiculous
 
She laughed at me, and got the salt, and shook it all over the page
You’re salty
 
She’s a product of her age
(So much is, even me)
 
This is her age:
17 die in Florida
28 in Sandy Hook
13 in Colorado
 
I don’t even think she remembers Sandy Hook
I remember
I stood outside the back door of the elementary school with other parents, and we were red-rimmed and leaking
We talked about how it felt like Columbine, and 9/11, and the Challenger explosion
How those 20 dead children hit air and fluoresced
And we were left with hard blue streaks just behind our eyelids that could not be got out with rubbing
(Could not be got out with anything)
We caught up our children and hugged them so hard they told us we were weird.
 
You’re weird, mom, let me go.
 
Here’s a story problem:
Two students walk into a school with guns and bags of explosives
One man kills his mom and then walks into a school with a gun
One man walks into a school with a gun
One teacher uses himself as a shield
One student stands in a doorway to usher others to safety
One student sits on the floor and cries
One student calls her mom
One student runs with his hands up
One student jumps out the window
One student didn't go to school that day, because she had strep, and her inbox fills with horror
 
Here’s the answer:
Children die
Children die
Children die
 
All story problems are exponential and something like infinite
Because no parent can resolve their data set to one
When that one is dead on a school hallway floor
That dead child is neither anecdote nor data, but something worse:
It is a dead child.
 
Dead children are no answer
They are the beginning of a logarithm that curves up
Into the reckoning of our brutal calculus


(Originally written Feb 22, 2018, after the Stoneman Douglas high school shooting.) 

Zombie Children in The Walking Dead

ETA: At the very end of this list, I say out loud: there’s no way there’s going to be a zombie child in the last whatever dozen episodes left until the end of the series. So of course, there was just one in episode 5 of the 11th season, “Out of the Ashes”. Lol, assholes. I’ll add that in later.

————

I started trying to enumerate child zombies in movies when I watched the second Resident Evil movie, which has a whole classroom full of zombie kids swarm and then drag off one of the characters. I was so surprised by this: I couldn’t think of many movies that have a single child zombie, let alone a whole freaking classroom full of them. (Since then, I’ve identified two other films with classrooms full of zombie children: Cooties and The Girl With All the Gifts. It only makes sense that pedagogy intersects with zombified children when you think about it.) I started writing a post about undead children in film, but when I hit The Walking Dead, the post started getting unmanageable. So in the interests of sensible essay length, I’ve rounded up the instances of zombie children in The Walking Dead here instead.

I do think it’s notable that there are only a handful of zombie children in the entire 11 year run of The Walking Dead. Certainly, some of this has to do with what a pain in the ass working around the restrictions placed on child actors can be. Imagine a kid has to sit for 2 hours of makeup, how much time is even left in front of the camera? If someone is going to write a zombie child, it’s going to be to a specific purpose, otherwise why deal with the bother. Still feels a little weird there are so few, and none since the 6th season. Below is my list of zombie children we encounter in The Walking Dead, in chronological order.

NB: I have excluded teenagers from this list (which would bring the count up by another maybe 8-10) because I feel like an adolescent is a different thing than a straight up child, both practically and metaphorically. Likewise, I wouldn’t have included any undead babies, but there isn’t a single one in the entire run, so I didn’t have to worry about it. I’ve included two children who die in-narrative but don’t zombify because I think their story intersects with the themes you see with other undead children.

Unnamed child, “Days Gone By”

Though the series ends up having very, very few child zombies in its 11 year run, the very first zombie we encounter in the entire series is a child zombie. The cold open follows a man in a sheriff’s uniform and car pulling up to a highway gas station. (This is Rick Grimes, but we don’t know him yet.) He walks through stalled cars and the detritus of human habitation towards the gas pumps, where there is a sign hanging that says “No Gas.” He hears the patter of footsteps, and bends down to look under one of the cars. Little feet in grimy bunny slippers walk along, and we see a hand come down and pick up a teddy bear. “Little girl,” the man says, over and over, telling her he can help her. She has her back to him, and long blonde hair like the original zombie child, Karen from Night of the Living Dead. When she turns around, it becomes clear she’s dead, her lips torn away to reveal the silver braces on her teeth. She growls and starts towards him; he shoots her into her second death. She lands on her back and the camera cranes up over her now lifeless body in the grass.

There’s definitely an element of shock value to this scene, not in small part because it depicts a severe transgression: thou shalt not murder children on screen. However, I think this whole scene would run very, very differently if the child were anything other than a blonde white girl. Small town cops have a long history of facilitating the lynching of Black children, from Emmett Till, who was 14, to Tamir Rice, who was 12. The fact that Rick had to shoot down a pretty white blonde girl shows you exactly how out of balance the world has become. On the one hand, The Walking Dead does a pretty terrible job of addressing race overtly — for example, Merle Dixon’s racist monologues are so on the nose as to be embarrassing, and only partially redeemed by Michael Rooker’s expert delivery. On the other, in scenes like the first one, they know exactly what their choices mean to an American audience. Oh my god, you killed Karen.

Maybe this is something of a sidebar, but the scene directly after Rick kills the child opens with Rick’s deputy partner Shane delivering what he describes as a sermon on the perfidy of women. He describes his irritation with a woman in his life who apparently doesn’t turn off lights when she leaves the room. (Is this a stereotype of women? I feel like I’ve never heard that before.) He then disquisitions about how this makes her a hypocrite when she becomes upset about global warming. He relates to Rick all the bon mots he would have delivered had he not respected women so much or somesuch. Rick politely refuses to engage, but then seconds later, castigates his wife Lori for criticizing him in front of their kid. “The difference between men and women? I would never say anything that cruel to her, and certainly not in front of Carl.” This is probably outside the purview of this essay, but there is a lot to unpack here i/r/t gender roles, children, etc.

Palmer children, “Torn Apart” webisode

These zombie children are almost a sight gag — they are wearing party hats when they leap out and devour their neighbor — but contextually, there is some commentary on domesticity going on. We are first introduced to them (we can hear them banging upstairs) when a man breaks into his neighbor, Mike Palmer’s house to find a gun. The neighbor appears and threatens the interloper Andrew with a gun, then asks him what he’s looking for. “Guns,” says the man, at which point the neighbor delivers a sneering monologue about how Andrew always looked down on him, but who needs real America’s guns now, eh? Mike also explained that it is his birthday, and he already had to kill his wife, but couldn’t bring himself to shoot the kids. He counts out the bullets — one for the dog, two for the kids, one for me, etc — then turns the gun over to the man, who shoots him. By counting out the bullets like that, Mike implies Andrew should put the kids down as well. We eventually see the kids when Andrew returns to find the neighbor’s car keys. They attack and kill him, meaning he obviously didn’t carry out the neighbor’s dying wish.

Andrew is part of a little domestic melodrama going on next door, which includes him, his ex-wife, their children, and his current wife. Though he and his ex-wife have a chilly peace, he’s overbearing with the kids, shouting them down with little reason. Mom accuses him of being out of touch because he’s a weekend-and-holidays parent. The step-mom dies, reanimates, and tries to murder her step-kids, at which point his ex-wife and the mother of the children puts an ax in her skull, telling the step-mom to “stay away from my family.” All of this is incredibly on the nose. Divorce and remarriage are existential threats to the children. Absent fathers shirk their responsibilities to their own demise.

Honestly though, I don’t want to overstate, because there is a lot of morbid humor in a deadbeat dad getting attacked by birthday-behatted kiddies. In the end, the mom sacrifices herself so her kids can live, and eventually becomes the first zombie Rick Grimes encounters (but the second we see on screen), the so-called bicycle zombie in the park.

Sophia Peletier, “Pretty Much Dead Already”

Carol’s pretty blonde daughter, Sophia, provides all of the motivation for The Walking Dead’s annoying second season. She’s chased off in the first episode by walkers in a herd that passes them by on the highway. The group goes after her, and are taken to Hershel’s farm once Carl, Rick’s 12 year old kid, is shot by accident. (I only mention this because it feels like a parallelism: Rick’s son is imperiled at the same time Carol’s daughter is in missing, making danger to children something of a theme.) Hershel is high-handed and superior through the whole season, delivering sermonettes on the humanity of the walkers and asserting his land rights whenever someone says something that bothers him. I get it, on a level. We’re living through a brutal pandemic, and many, many people are making public health into a private rights issue, which is part of what Hershel is doing here.

In the last third of the season, it is revealed that Hershel has been keeping Sophia (and a whole passel of other walkers) in the barn on the property. Rick even knows that Hershel has been keeping walkers in the barn, and no one thinks to check for Sophia. After Rick and Hershel show up with walkers controlled with dog-catchers’ poles, Shane begins ranting angrily about the profound lack of reality driving both Rick and Hershel’s actions. (One of the more annoying parts of season 2 is that mostly, Shane isn’t wrong.) Shane kills the collared walkers before he knocks the lock off the barn and lets all the walkers out. Rick’s group shoots all the emerging walkers while the people too soft to enact violence — Hershel. Lori, Carl, etc — cower and cry. Once all the walkers are dead, they hear a growl from the barn and an undead Sophia emerges. Carol tries to run to her, but is held in place by Daryl. Rick raises his gun, in a parallel with the first season, and shoots the zombified Sophia.

I know this is the expediencies of television, but I literally do not understand why anyone ever gives Hershel the time of day after this disaster. He kept zombie Sophia in the barn for the entire season, while everyone was worried sick looking for her. He knew they were looking for a girl and couldn’t be arsed to check. (Additionally, because of his insistence that the undead are just sick, his daughter Beth is nearly killed by her zombified mother at the beginning of the next episode.) This is a disastrous lack of reality, and Hershel’s delusions have moved from passively dangerous to actively so. After the barn massacre, Hershel flounces, telling Rick’s group to get off his land, and it’s only after his farm is burnt to the ground that he seems to appreciate Rick (or more specifically, Shane) might have been right.

But it doesn’t take long for show to begin justifying his bullshit. Maybe it’s just American middle class theology, which he often spews: He’s the godamn paterfamilias, the head of the family, and all of his choices are the right ones because he’s the only one with the right to choice in the first place. By the time he dies a season or two hence, he’s the moral mouthpiece and kindly patriarch, which is a pretty appalling choice, if you think about it even a little. He kept a woman’s dead child in a barn, and then told her to get off his land once that was discovered. Fuck Hershel.

Penny Blake, “Say the Word” & “Made to Suffer”

Bucking precedent, Penny Blake, the undead daughter of the 3rd and 4th season antagonist The Governor, is a brown-haired white girl. We first meet Penny in a 3rd season cold open: The Governor is brushing the hair of a girl. We never quite see her face, and can hear a soft wheezing. The girl is quiet until hairbrush snags on her hear, tearing a chunk of hair and skin off her head. Then she starts struggling, and it becomes apparent that she is undead. The Governor restrains her, putting a bag over her head, then cuddles with the struggling, growling walker. He tells her that daddy still loves her, then puts her back in the closet crawlspace with some irritation when she won’t settle. (We get this sequence of events in a later episode, with the added detail that he’s been feeding her human flesh, which is one of my least favorite zombie tropes.)

Much of the third season is spent drawing parallels between Rick and the Governor in regards to their leadership styles, so it’s of note that the next scene after Penny’s introduction is the horrible aftermath of Judith’s birth and Lori’s death. It’s Daryl who steps up to direct the group in what needs to be done, while Rick is first catatonic, then runs off into the prison with an ax, presumably to kill every walker he can find. The Governor obviously lost his daughter, and instead of grieving her death, he keeps her murderous corpse in the walls of the house. (I have this thing about houses as embodiments of the psyche, so that tracks.) Rick lost his wife, and instead of caring for his daughter (or son, come to that), he hauls off on a murderous rampage.

Sidebar: There is also something of a zombie kids fakeout later in the episode, when Daryl and Maggie look for formula in an abandoned nursery school. I fully expected zombie kids to pop out the whole time, but the only thing that did was an opossum. (Which Daryl shoots and then says, “Dinner.” Maggie deadpans, “You’re not putting that in my bag.”) Another setup for a zombie child happens with Daryl, Denise, and Rosita are scavenging in an apothecary in the 6th season episode, “Twice as Far.” Denise finds a zombie with a cast next to a pack and play. She runs a flashlight over the wall, where the word HUSH is written over and over. When the flashlight settles on a stationary tub, a toddler sized shoe sticks out of bloody water. It probably would have made sense for this dead toddler to be a walker, but this scene is already disturbing enough, thanks.

The Governor’s zombie daughter meets her eventual, final demise when Michonne discovers Penny. First she thinks Penny is a live child he’s imprisoned, but when it becomes clear Penny is dead — and honestly, wouldn’t Penny reek — she goes to kill her. The Governor intervenes, begging for mercy. It’s probably the most nakedly emotional we ever see the Governor; he is in real anguish. Michonne kills her anyway, which results in a pretty brutal fight scene, during which his fish tanks full of heads are destroyed as well. I don’t think there’s much deeper going on here, other than the Governor’s ties to his past (and therefore his humanity) have been well and truly severed.

The death of another ersatz daughter — this time the girl Meghan Chamblers — also marks the Governor’s severance from humanity, later in the 4th season. After his first assault on the prison is unsuccessful — and he murders a fair number of the Woodbury residents — he ends up in the wilds alone for a time. Eventually he finds the Chambler family hiding out in an apartment building: two sisters, their father, and one of the sisters’ daughter. After bonding with the child and beginning a relationship with her mother, the Governor begins to amass the power and structure necessary to wage another assault on the prison.

The child ends up being his justification for his ruthless megalomania, while also checking his worst impulses: he can’t be too overtly evil or his found family will bolt. His girlfriend appears with a dead Meghan in her arms — Meghan was killed by a buried walker — just in time to see him hacking Hershel’s head off with Michonne’s sword. His unrestrained violence makes him incapable of keeping a family, which is his overt motive for the violence, in a sort of ouroboros. (Obviously, this is so much window-dressing; the Governor is just a psycho.) Which is kinda interesting, because TWD very often implies the exact opposite: Rick is constantly enacting ethically dodgy violent expedience in the name of community or domestic safety, up to, and including, sneak attacking a rival group as a preemptive strike and murdering people in their beds.

Lizzie and Mika Samuels, “The Grove”

Alright, technically, neither Lizzie nor Mika zombify in the course of the narrative, but the dangers of domesticity and fears of and for children are all over their story. Lizzie and Mika are, again, pretty blonde girls who join the group while they are living in the prison. Lizzie is 12 and either a budding sociopath or emotionally damaged by living through the zombie apocalypse (or why not both?) She has developed dangerous and alarming beliefs about the nature of the undead — that they are her friends, that she can hear them speak, that they are just like the living — which she then acts on in increasingly bloody ways. When she was introduced, she’s naming walkers, and when Carl admonishes her to knock it off, saying they kill people, she retorts that people kill people and they still have names.

After the prison falls, Carol and Tyreese end up on the road together with a little found family of Lizzie, Mika, and baby Judith. After finding a pecan farm with a well-stocked farmhouse, they decide to rest for a bit. It’s a sanctuary and relief from their time alone on the road. Tyreese and Carol discuss maybe staying indefinitely while Lizzie spirals more and more into her delusions. She feeds a downed walker, almost allowing him to bite her; she had a complete meltdown and tantrum when Carol kills a walker whom she was “playing” with. Late in the episode, Tyreese and Carol are horrified to discover Lizzie standing over a dead Mika, bloody knife in her hands. She tells them she’s going to show them that walkers are friendly when her sister reanimates. She also implies she’s going to murder the baby Judith, who is lying on a blanket behind her. Carol and Tyreese talk her down, and Tyreese takes her and Judith inside while Carol does the needful with Mika’s corpse.

That night, Carol and Tyreese have a heartbroken conversation about what they’re going to do about Lizzie. She clearly can’t be allowed to be around an infant, but she’s also dangerous indirectly: they realize she was the one mutilating animals and feeding the walkers back in the prison, which eventually lead to walkers breaching the fences. (Tyreese also thinks she must have been the one who killed his girlfriend, but of course that was Carol, who has been keeping that from him.) Though I don’t think anyone voices this out loud, they decide she will have to be killed. Carol takes her out, tells her to “look at the flowers” — which was a self-soothing method she and her sister used — and then shoots her in the back of the head.

This is obviously a different Carol than the one who watched Rick kill her zombie daughter back in season two, and a very different Carol to the one who submitted to an abusive husband in season one. She’s a harder, more violently expedient Carol. She was the one back in the prison who was teaching the children survival skills over the objections of parents who wanted to shield them from the violence in the world. Carol believes that her daughter might have lived if she’d known how to wield a knife, which is why she teaches the community kids how to do so. That one of her students then uses those knife skills to kill another child feels like an unfair irony. It almost seems like a narrative punishment that Carol feels compelled to murder a little girl who looks a lot like her own dead daughter.

There is a similar situation in the comics — one where an older sibling kills a younger one — but it is handled very differently. The adults lock up the kid and then spent the night arguing about what should be done. While they are incapacitated by indecision, Carl sneaks into the place the kid is held and kills the kid himself. Comics’ Carl makes the hard choices he believes the older generation is incapable of, and the episode shows the disconnect between the generation being raised in the zombie apocalypse, and the one whose instincts belong to a different world entirely. That sort of generational gloss isn’t in evidence in Lizzie’s story: it’s more about Carol’s role as a parental figure to children. Since the prison, Carol uses violence to protect domesticity. In “The Grove”, that violence finally turns inward, destroying the very thing it was supposed to preserve.

Noah’s brother, “What Happened and What’s Going On”

This the first and only Black child zombie in The Walking Dead’s run. He is one of Noah’s younger twin brothers whom Tyreese encounters and is bitten by when they return to Noah’s gated community. Little backstory: the group encountered Noah while Beth was being held by former Atlanta PD who have taken over a hospital. When he’s sprung from that situation, Noah tells the group that his family lives in a gated neighborhood not far from the hospital — or they did a year before he was incarcerated. When they arrive back at his neighborhood, Noah is horrified to discover the community is overrun. Tyreese tries to comfort him, but Noah runs directly into his old house.

Tyreese follows and ends up in one of Noah’s brothers’ bedrooms, where one of the brothers is disemboweled and dead on the bed. He’s distracted by a photo of the two boys sitting on a porch swing when the other, undead brother attacks and bites him. He reflexively kills the boy, then sinks down with his back to wall and goes into shock. Much of the rest of the episode shows Tyreese hallucinating various dead characters from the show: Beth, Bob, and, notably, the Samuels sisters as friendly voices, the Governor and Martin (one of the Terminus bad guys) as the voice of regret and recrimination.

The Walking Dead doesn’t much go in for overtly symbolic arthouse stylings, but much of this episode, especially anything having to do with Tyreese, is very much in the mode of a dream sequence, down to an atypically impressionistic cold open. Tyreese has been having a crisis of violence for the last while, reluctant to enact the violence that life in the zombie apocalypse seems to require. In his vision, Martin and the Governor keep telling him that his reticence to kill has instead gotten people killed, while Bob espouses a more cheerfully fatalistic philosophy: everything has happened as it should. The girls tell him that “it’s better now”, which I take to mean, it’s ok that we’re dead and that you’re going to die.

Honestly, I’m not sure what to make of all this, especially with Lizzie Samuels on the side of happy fatalism. The Walking Dead often severely punishes its characters who eschew violence, and this seems like the most symbolically overt example of that. Tyreese doesn’t want to kill, which is what’s necessary to protect the people he loves. As a consequence, he is killed by a reanimated family member, a child and representation of the promise of domesticity.

Unnamed child, “No Way Out”

In this 6th season episode, one in which the city of Alexandria is overrun with walkers, we catch a glimpse of a single child zombie within the horde. It’s possible this lone undead child is the son or nephew of someone on set, like the two zombie children in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead are related to Tom Savini, the effects person. This one zombie child is just part of a mob of walkers, and we know literally nothing else about him. However, given the context, this kid might be more deliberately placed than just crowd scene background. The child Sam sees the zombie child right in the middle of a freakout about the “monsters”, a freakout which ultimately gets him, his older brother, and his mother killed.

Backing up a bit: the Alexandrians have been split up by the invading horde, and Rick and a few others are trapped in Jessie’s house. Jessie is the mother of Sam and Ron, who are about 10 and 16. Sam’s most important on-screen relationship, outside of his immediate family, is with Carol. Sam takes to her early on in her sojourn in Alexandria because she is the source of cookies in her guise as dumb housewife Carol. (Carol’s ability to code-switch, especially in this period, is impressive. She’ll go from ditzy lady to stone cold killer in a second.) But when he follows her into places he’s (and she’s) not supposed to be, what he gets is brutal truths Carol. She clearly doesn’t want to get involved in the life of another child, and she’s constantly trying to run him off while almost reflexively caring for him.

It’s probably also pertinent to mention that both Carol and Jessie have both experienced domestic abuse: Carol in the past, while Jessie’s is ongoing. Carol doesn’t believe she’d still be alive if her abusive husband were as well. She advocates that Jessie’s husband be killed — it’s the only way, in this hard world, to deal with that situation — not in small part because of the effect of the abuse on Sam. After some serious machinations, Rick indeed does kill Sam’s abusive father, which isn’t the thing that puts Sam over the edge. It’s when one of the Wolves breaks into the house and tries to murder his mom (in the kitchen, and in a crazy harrowing fight scene) that he really spirals into his anxiety.

By the 6th season, before the city is overrun, Sam has confined himself to the second floor of the house, unable to function even within the family structure. He leaves food to rot and draws endless pictures of the undead and the dying. “Nothing changes up here,” he tells his mom when she tries to lure him downstairs with cookies. The changelessness of the second floor is broken when Rick carries a bitten and dying Deanna, the community’s leader, up to one of the spare bedrooms. The walls of the city have been breached, and walkers fill the streets. Sam’s mom, Jessie, steps away from their ministrations to Deanna, but she’s harried and barely containing her frustration with Sam’s anxiety. “Just pretend you’re somebody who’s not scared,” she says, and then turns back to the more pressing crisis.

Because here’s the thing: often children hide their crises from their parents out of shame or fear, and at the same time parents are sometimes too caught up with the trouble in front of them to identify and head off the trouble quietly brewing. Jessie knew there was something wrong with Sam, something potentially serious, but there was always more going on around them that required attention, plus his was a quiet, unassuming kind of wrong. Sure, telling Sam he should pretend to be someone else probably isn’t best practices, but by the time the zombies are scratching at the door, she’s out of options.

The group decide to smear themselves in walker guts and slip camouflaged by death through the overrun streets. Sam is terrified, but Jessie talks him into it. They make it all the way to a sheltered clump of trees, where they regroup for their next push through the horde. The minister, Gabriel, is going to take baby Judith to the church, and the rest of the group is headed for the armory. Rick wants to send Sam with Gabriel to the church, but Sam objects: I can do it, he says, entreating his mother to stay with her. Both Jessie and Sam want Sam to be able to handle this so strongly that Jessie capitulates, and everyone head off, hands linked.

But force of will can’t overcome such deep seated anxiety. In the middle of the zombie horde, Sam melts down. He hears Carol in his head telling him the monsters are coming for him, and stops in his tracks. His mother and Rick try to get him to move, come on, Sam, you can do it. When he looks into the zombie horde, he sees a zombie child, about his age, walking within the throng. At this point Sam begins keening, and the zombies close in, surrounding and biting him. In short order, both his mother and older brother are dead. The family is gone in the span of a minute. (Carl manages to get himself shot, again, like when Sophia disappeared.)

The undead child, in this context, ends up being an avatar of Sam’s anxiety. It is his greatest fear made manifest, right before it is truly made manifest. It’s also the ultimate dramatic irony: he was so afraid of become a walker that he did things that made him into a walker. That he hears Carol’s voice when he sees the undead kid ties Carol, again, to the death of a child, though I legitimately do not understand why it’s Carol Sam hears. Sure, ok, she threatened him a season ago, but she’s not why he’s broken from reality. He was abused by his father and was witness to a brutal attack on his mother by a stranger. Of course he’s paralyzed by anxiety. (And I’ve got to say, poor fucking Carol, because they do this again to her when her adopted son dies at the hands of the Whisperers.)

This undead child is the last zombie kid we ever see on The Walking Dead unless, of course, there’s another in the last half of the 11th season, though I doubt that given the further restrictions of Covid on filming. I think it’s interesting that this last zombie kid may or may not be real: he’s more of a psychological manifestation than a concrete actor in the narrative, and pretty subtle for all that. The Walking Dead has done psychological woo dream sequences before — Rick talked to a dead Lori on the guilty-conscience-ma-phone for a whole season, Tyreese hallucinated his dead friends while dying, etc — but they tend to be pretty loud and obvious. Too bad they learned subtlety just in time to never use it again.

ETA: Jasmine and Bobby, “The World Before” & “What We Become”

This one is a little oblique, but bear with me. I rewatched the episodes with Virgil recently because he appears in the last half of the last season, and I couldn’t remember what his deal was. In season 10, he encounters Michonne and some others in a library, where he rescues one of their number from a walker and then runs off. The Oceansiders capture him creeping round trying to steal a boat; he and Michonne have a tense convo; they decide to sail for his island. Once there, they (but mostly Michonne) clear a building of walkers. In the end, they find a room full of hanged walkers, suspended and wheeling their feet uselessly in the air. Virgil comes into the room, picks a shoe off the floor, and replaces it onto the foot of one of the hanged walkers. This is his family, dead and reanimated, hanging from the ceiling. We don’t see what happens, but it’s implied that Michonne puts them down, and then they bury them.

It turns out that Virgil is a nutter, having imprisoned the other members of the island community once he accidentally lead to the deaths of his family. We’re never given the ages of his children, but from dialogue cues, I get the sense the daughter is young, maybe prepubescent. Even less is known about his son. Michonne spends much of the episode hallucinating the road not taken, one where she lets Andrea die and ends up as Negan’s right hand. There’s a way in which this hanged family is also a manifestation of the dangers of getting too hard, too self-interested. There’s something gruesomely ethereal about the way Virgil’s family wheels and sways above the ground, like Dante’s Forest of Suicides. Recall that Dante uses the Roman poet Virgil as his guide through hell in Inferno. Here, another Virgil guides Michonne through horrors.

Unnamed child, “Out of the Ashes”

Whelp, I was wrong about there being no zombie children in the last season of The Walking Dead. The fifth episode, “Out of the Ashes” deals with children a lot, both obliquely and obviously. The cold open is a dream sequence in which Aaron tries to protect his daughter, Gracie, from a number of villains from seasons previous: whisperers, Wolves, walkers, maybe even a Savior or two. (Aaron adopted Gracie after our people, the ostensible good guys, killed her parents in a sneak attack on the Saviors.) The walls are breached, which leads to a discussion about how they don’t have the tools to effectively fix the fence. Aaron & Co head back to Alexandria to scavenge any supplies. There they find assorted Whisperers who have been looting and squatting in the place, which sets Aaron off big time.

Later we see tiny badass Judith training a group of other children how to use swords. She’s distracted by a group of other kids, lead by a boy who must be a little older, taunting a child zombie who has his head stuck through one of the holes in the wall around their community. They’re poking their fingers in the walker’s snapping jaws and pulling out before they get bit. Judith tells them to knock it off, then the older boy knocks her over and tells her she talks too much and that’s why her mother left. Judith pulls a knife and dares him to say that again. He demurs and the group runs off.

There have been a number of scenes with the apocalypse kids interacting this season, and they have mostly been as bad as this one. An episode or so ago, a bunch of tiny badasses, including Judith and Hershel, all sat around playing cards and discussing how their parents don’t want them to worry when they’re out facing near certain death. While I think this is not true to how kids interact, fine. It’s not anywhere near as bad as this mess with Judith and the bully by the fence. Where do these kids come from that they are so cavalier with the walking dead, especially after the walls were breached that very morning, and several community members got killed?

I get that kids can act like immortal, entitled assholes, but this kid absolutely must know the world of hurt in store him both if he got bit, or if any adult found him. That Judith didn’t just cut a bitch instead of threatening to tell Rosita is, frankly, bizarre to me. I know I get down on the show for overuse of violent expedience, but here it is absolutely called for. The stakes are too damn high for nonsense like this to be allowed. Which the show even knows on a level, as that’s what the zombie child more or less symbolizes: he’s what’s going to happen to them if they don’t knock it off, and not just symbolically.

Just to argue with myself a bit: I can see the psychology of why these kids would fuck around with walkers, even while knowing the finding was inevitable. I think a lot of stupid dangerous Tiktok challenges — eating Tide pods, inhaling cinnamon, climbing crates — are the risk-taking behavior of the hopeless. We live in an unstable world, which is burned and parched and buffeted by storm, by plague. Refusing to vaccinate, eating fish cleaner and horse paste, all of these maladaptive performances of “freedom” make climbing up on some crates knowing you’re going to fall look positively benign. At least in that case, the only person hurt is the climber. So, okay, I still think that sequence was badly done — the dialogue — but it probably does capture the cultural moment, such as it is.

Either way, I’m not going to make any more predictions about whether there will be more undead kids on the show.