Book 30: Brains: A Zombie Memoir

Brains: A Zombie Memoir

Robin Becker

Harper Voyager. 2010

What a glorious, ghoulish gait down the lofty gantry of the badass brain-eating zombie genre.

Outstanding book. 5/5 Masturbating Monkeys, all across the board.

The author, Robin Becker, (whose blog and band you should check out, if you know what's good for you) totally and completely rocked my world with Brains.

Like many of the books I read (and almost all of the books I've read for this little project), I didn't do any research before I start reading them. Aside from the obvious subject matter of Zombies, I didn't know the what Becker had in store for me as a reader. What a pleasant surprise.

The reader follows a modern-day prometheus professor zombie who just happens to maintain the ability to think, plan, reason, read and write. He meets other skilled zombies and they have themselves an odyssey. I am reminded of Tom Robbins' animated inanimates in Skinny Legs and All, but the characters of Brains have a much loftier goal.

The writing was just delicious. Accessible and packed tighter than 18 virgins in a Volkswagen. The prose is layered, and the plot is really well thought-out.  Character development is nicely done; I felt empathy for the soulless undead. Brains delivers all of the elements aspiring writers know they need to include in their fiction.

The conventional (and some well-received unconventional) elements of fiction are present here, but their presence isn't overwhelming.

Some authors will beat you to death's door with unnecessary exposition, thinking that it is a suitable replacement for character development, while others make it a point to find a rule and break it to the point that the misplaced mechanics distract from the story (I'm looking at you Cormac "I'm so cool I don't need quotation marks" McCarthy).  

Not Ms. Becker. She knows her shit.  That might have something to do with her being a writing professor.

As usual, I'll give a few examples so you can judge for yourself if this is the kind of thing you're into. If you're not, then you probably have a boring sense of humor.

"Geraldo bludgeoned the zombette with his microphone, but to no effect. The mic merely sank into the undead's head, disappearing like a baby thrown into quicksand."

Yes, that Geraldo. And yes, Geraldo has tattoos.

You know what a baby being thrown into quicksand looks like? Me too!

"For breakfast I veered into the trees and found a rabbit's nest. The mother and her five bunnies screamed as I bit into them. The sound was unexpected, as piercing and angry as the cry of a newborn stuffed into a trash can at prom."

See, at MY prom, I thought someone eating rabbits in the bathroom. Now I know!

"In life, I wouldn't have looked twice at these men. They were large and one wore an oversized T-shirt advertising Pepsi. Both had on NASCAR ball caps.

The only Homer they knew was Simpson; their favorite beer was Bud Light. Their idea of an art film was The Shawshank Redemption and their wives collected Precious Moments figurines. What could I possibly talk about with them? The weather?"


When did Robin Becker meet my cousins?



"Everything in me sang:

"

Okay, Becker. You win. I give up. You're my new favorite author.

"Rosencrantz and Guildernstern were undead.
Oh, gotta love those allusions."

Yesssssssss! Yes you do gotta love those allusions! If you don't, well, I don't know what to do for you.

"Joan, Ros, Annie, and I plodded along, bringing pestilence, war, famine and death-- but at a glacial pace, the velocity of slugs. Call us the Four Retarded Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It might take us a while, but eventually we'll kill and eat you. Relax while you wait -- have a cannoli."

That speaks for itself, I think.


This is the only novel of this length I've ever read which, to my memory, uses the word "simulacrum" twice.

If this happened on purpose, I think this was a good editorial decision.
There are several different types of readers, but generally, they can be divided into two groups: Those that look words up, and those that run on context clues to define words.

I don't fit into either of these groups because I'm illiterate, but it seems that using a word like simulacrum twice would be sufficient for optimal impact. The lookeruppers will have looked simulacrum up the first time, and then had their definition reinforced later. Similarly, the contextcluers would be able to gain more information for their vague and less-effective definition.

If an author drops simulacrum once, they're just showing off. If they drop it three times in a novel this length, they really, really want you to know how large their vocabulary is. Twice is just right.

Like Goldilocks.

Except here, Goldilocks is the one who is juuuuust right.


I think I'll stop with the quotes there. I've marked several more passages, sentences and specific word choices which really, really worked, but you should just go read the damn thing yourself. 

I can't imagine how much fun it was to write this novel. Probably at least half as fun as it was for me to read it.



I know zombies are big right now.  But Brains is here to stay.



Not only was reading  Brains an entertaining and enlightening experience, it was inspiring. There's a novel in me. At least one. Maybe more. Probably more, but they might just stay there if I don't do something about it most ricky-tick.

I've been pretty successful at making excuses for not finishing the one(s) I've started, or starting other projects I'm more interested in at the time. But I really can't allow myself to do that anymore. Some things will be coming up in the near future which will be even more of a time vampire than Fallout 3, so I need to get my shit in gear.

Book 8: The Zombie Survival Guide

The Zombie Survival Guide

Max Brooks

Three Rivers Press

2003

I knew this book took itself seriously before I read it, but I didn't realize it took itself this seriously.

The hype around The Zombie Survival Guide is pretty intense, and has been since it reached some popularity in the mid 00s. It's been on the must-read list for a while now, and I'm glad I got around to it.

It's definitely recommended reading for even those who do not consider the inevitable zombie apocalypse to be a real threat. Hopefully, most people recognize how fragile society, especially a post-industrial society, is. Three days' of downed supply lines will leave any and every urban and suburban community out of damn near every consumable good.

If folks know something bad is coming, it'll be even less time than that as people have a tendency to horde for a three-inch snow storm, let alone the erasure of the last 500 years of human development at the hands of listless, moaning hordes of the undead.

This would be a good way to introduce the callous and apathetic social participant to the concept of preparation. In the world we live in, shit does have a tendency to happen. Shit constantly happens, as a matter of fact, and it happens to lots of people in lots of places all around the world.

Outside of North America and Western Europe, we can observe a high frequency of shit happening. Although we do see occasional shit in the “developed” world, our shit usually has something to do with a repressive police state in one way or another.

In most of the rest of the world, the shit people deal with is more of a “Am I going to see my next birthday?” vintage.

Here's some shit happening in Greece:

And here we see some shit from Iran:

African shit:

British shit going down:

This is the shit some Chineese Muslims decided to bring:

No one is insulated from shit going down.

As much as people like to bury their heads in the sand and make tell themselves that as long as they have their toaster and their TV and their steel-belted radials everything is going to be A-OK. Forever.

The most casual observer of history knows that nothing lasts forever. The Zombie Survival Guide helps prepare, through humor and fantasy, otherwise apocalypse-ignorant folks for the very real possibility that shit will be going down in their hometown.

The book, as good as it is, has some problems. Its primary focus is on the United States. This is a mistake. I understand that it's impossible for one book to cover everything, but it would have been helpful to remind the reader that in other parts of the world, people know how to take care of business. They live and die by their decisions on a daily basis, so they may be helpful allies in the war against a dark army of soulless ghouls. This really isn't the case with the average 'Merikan.

It's other major fault is that it addresses the reader as though they'll be leading whatever post-apocalyptic group they happen to fall into. The universal axiom that too many chiefs and not enough Indians is a big problem and needs more than the cursory lipservice we see in The Zombie Survival Guide.

The case studies, at the end, were honestly a waste of time. It's not like they lend any serious credibility to the book, and they offer little practical advice. If anything, they reinforce the ideas covered in earlier chapters. Maybe some people need that. Most don't, though.

I've read several "survival guides." While most of them are geared towards outdoor skills and navigation, few have much to say about urban survival. There are so-called urban survival guides out there, but, as I understand them, their main thesis is that you should stay indoors, STFU, and wait for things to cool down. That won't be the case when the zombies come.

While it's nice to see the niche market of zombie survivalism develop (lots of books on Amazon), I wonder how much of it is Man Vs. Wild nonsense.

So while the Zombie Survival Guide takes itself seriously-- it doesn't bullshit you -- I hope people can make good use of it for more than just a laugh.