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anna_hepworth's review
2.0
I was a judge for the 2015 Aurealis Awards. This review is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of any judging panel, the judging coordinator or the Aurealis Awards management team.
There are some great ideas here, and it is nice to see some subtle exploration of what zombies and zombie apocalyses might be; thematically it works well, the writing is relatively uniformly good, but it isn‰ЫЄt great. Also, I hated it from start to finish. I hated the way he writes men, the way he writes women, the way he writes interpersonal relationships. I find them caricatures, not credible, eye-rollingly Wrong.
More detailed observations:
- The cover is hauntingly suggestive. The contents are all new to me, bar one. Hood's preface brings out an erudite scholar talking on a topic that he is well versed in. He sets up the collection artfully: setting the scene, delimiting the boundaries of what he is and is not defining as a zombie or 'living dead'.
There are really only two stories in the collection that I liked. The political thriller 'Behind Dark Blue Eyes', with good handling of the trope of the journalist who gets in over their head plus a decidedly creepy ending; and 'Professor Cadaveros‰ЫЄ Experiments in Transcendent Mortality as Recorded in Zombie Cinema' which is a clever commentary on zombie movies.
Other than that, I found a lot of the stories dull. I couldn't really pull out whether this is an aspect of the stories, or a personal lack of interest in the matter. However, I found the stories just a bit too similar, despite their variety of subtly different takes on the genre. The plots are reasonable, but I found that aspects of the world-building were elided, and the characterisations off. And the noir story really doesn't handle the sexist nastiness of the underlying style well at all.
There are some great ideas here, and it is nice to see some subtle exploration of what zombies and zombie apocalyses might be; thematically it works well, the writing is relatively uniformly good, but it isn‰ЫЄt great. Also, I hated it from start to finish. I hated the way he writes men, the way he writes women, the way he writes interpersonal relationships. I find them caricatures, not credible, eye-rollingly Wrong.
More detailed observations:
- The cover is hauntingly suggestive. The contents are all new to me, bar one. Hood's preface brings out an erudite scholar talking on a topic that he is well versed in. He sets up the collection artfully: setting the scene, delimiting the boundaries of what he is and is not defining as a zombie or 'living dead'.
There are really only two stories in the collection that I liked. The political thriller 'Behind Dark Blue Eyes', with good handling of the trope of the journalist who gets in over their head plus a decidedly creepy ending; and 'Professor Cadaveros‰ЫЄ Experiments in Transcendent Mortality as Recorded in Zombie Cinema' which is a clever commentary on zombie movies.
Other than that, I found a lot of the stories dull. I couldn't really pull out whether this is an aspect of the stories, or a personal lack of interest in the matter. However, I found the stories just a bit too similar, despite their variety of subtly different takes on the genre. The plots are reasonable, but I found that aspects of the world-building were elided, and the characterisations off. And the noir story really doesn't handle the sexist nastiness of the underlying style well at all.
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