Deadline
Seanan McGuire
I'll begin with this observation: I felt relief when my kindle progress meter told me that I had completed 80% of Deadline. I would soon be finished! Well, all you readers out there know that is a very bad sign. I mean, if it was an Microeconomics textbook I might not be dismayed to realize that I was looking forward to escape. But in a novel that I read hoping to be entertained, it was a bad thing. Now, I can and will intellectualize this feeling, but that desire for escape is really the bottom line. I cannot give a high rating to a novel I wanted out of while I was reading it.
I'm reading the Newflesh series because I set myself a project of reading everything Seanan McGuire has published. I like McGuire a lot. In fact, the most recent novel I read where reaching the 80% mark filled me with sadness was her Reflections. Yet so far I have found everything published under her Mira Grant pseudonym a chore to get through. I think I finally understand why now. I will explain below.
So, about Deadline. The previous novel Feed ended with Shaun Mason putting a bullet in the brain of the love of his life, his sister Georgia Mason, because she had become a zombie. Deadline is carried on by Shaun, who lives with a persistent hallucination of George. If this is insanity, Shaun doesn't want to be sane. Georgia and Shaun and their colleagues had uncovered a conspiracy of unknown nature centered on the zombies. The investigation of that conspiracy is the business of Deadline.
The good things: Crazy Shaun is a sympathetic character -- you feel for his loss. Also, McGuire in this book pulls off what I think of as the characteristic Seanan McGuire move: she uncovers a deep secret that rewrites the past. By the time you reach the middle of Deadline, you will have learned that what you thought happened in Feed is not actually what happened at all. Something entirely different was going on. Revelations of deeper truths are always satisfying. Also, Deadline ends with an intriguing plot twist that I did not see coming, and it interests me enough to look forward to Blackout. So there are some interesting characters and a rather nice plot here -- three stars for that.
So why don't the Mira Grant novels work for me? (The following is really more about me and what I want in a book than about Deadline per se, so feel free to ignore it -- that's why I saved it for the last.) Why is Mira Grant? If you look at the Mira Grant biography on Goodreads, it will be immediately obvious to you that Mira Grant is McGuire's horror brand. For instance, in the first paragraph of the bio, derivatives of the word "horror" appear four times.
So, horror is the Mira Grant hook. If you are not horrified by a Mira Grant novel, it's not going to work for you. And I am not.
My problem here is that I'm a card-carrying biologist. It doesn't bother me that if you cut an animal open you'll see writhing, glistening internal organs. I am not horrified by spiders, snakes, and worms -- in fact, they are things of beauty. I know that one day I will die, and that, if my body were to decay naturally, it (not I, but it -- my body) would become a large hunk of putrefying meat. I feel no horror at the prospect -- in fact, I find it fascinating. (This is one reason why I enjoy Kathy Reichs' novels.) McGuire in her Mira Grant persona tries to horrify with biology, and if you're not horrified by biology, it doesn't work.
"But...ZOMBIES!!!" I hear you saying. Surely even someone fascinated by real biology can be horrified by zombies! Well, yeah, but for one problem. The science McGuire invents to animate her zombies is so ridiculous that I can't take it seriously. It is as horrifying as a four-year-old child jumping out of the closet in tiger pajamas and shouting "RAWR!".
Now, let me be clear about some things. First, most science fiction makes next to no scientific sense. While I appreciate those rare SF authors who have the knowledge and dedication to get the science right (The Martian, for instance), I don't expect it. In pursuit of a good story I'll buckle on my suspension-of-disbelief suit and wade into the swamp. The problem with Mira Grant is more specific -- it's that the farcical science demolishes the edifice of horror she wants to build.
Second, my problem is not an aversion to horror per se. 1984, A Wrinkle in Time, and The Pear Shaped Man horrified me. More recently, Charles Stross's Dead Lies Dreaming was a horror treat. But the horror that works for me is psychological torment and terror.
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