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Book Review: Unchosen by Katharyn Blair

cover art for Unchosen by Katharyn Blair

Unchosen by Katharyn Blair

Katherine Tegen Books, 2021

ISBN-13 : 978-0062657640

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook  ( Bookshop.orgAmazon.com )

 

Two years ago, the world was cursed with an infection that spread through direct eye contact, turning the infected into bloodthirsty, cannibalistic killers whose personalities and intelligence degrade over time, leaving only the monster behind. An infected person can gain immunity if they look directly into the eyes of three uninfected people, meaning there is a huge market for uninfected people. I thought this was a creative, unusual idea for spreading and controlling the infection.

The infection was caused by the defiling of the remains of Anne de Graaf, a young woman who cursed a pirate captain and jumped to her death rather than allowing her body to be claimed. Her remains were discovered and treasure hunters attempted to rob her body, activating the curse. According to prophecy, only the Chosen One can end the curse (why this infection is the curse is unclear to me, but Blair does such a vivid job creating her apocalyptic world that it didn’t really matter to me).

Harlow, Charlotte, and Vanessa are sisters, living in a survival camp and attempting to avoid the notice of raiders and infected, or Vessels. Harlow, the oldest, is nineteen, attractive, athletic, musical, and a leader in the camp. She’s also the long-term girlfriend of Dean, Charlotte’s crush. Vanessa, the youngest, is a talented gymnast and also the Chosen One, something that’s kept very carefully under wraps. She has night terrors and makes prophecies in her sleep. Charlotte shares a bedroom with her and writes them down. Raiders searching for the Chosen One discover the camp. They know she is there, but not which sister. To protect her sisters, Charlotte claims to be the Chosen One. The other members of the camp, including Dean, Harlow, and Vanessa, are led to a different ship that will take them to the Blood Market to be sold.

Thus begins a series of terrifying adventures mostly based in Charlotte’s memories of Vanessa’s prophecies, some lucky breaks, and a lot of lies. Charlotte uses her status as “Chosen One” to manipulate those who have grown to consider her an ally, including a potential romantic partner, Seth, into her search for Dean rather than aiming straight for the area she will need to get to in order to break the curse.

Charlotte is resourceful and convincing, but she’s also selfish, and her inability to ever follow directions, even when it’s a life-threatening situation for herself or others, is maddening. Her treatment of both Seth and Dean was frustrating to watch, and the message of women claiming their power for themselves was undercut by Charlotte’s continual search for Dean and the back-and-forth with Seth, who clearly respects her much more than she respects him.

There’s also a science fiction aspect to the story. One of the characters, a virologist, is seeking a cure for the infection. The combination of “infection caused by a curse” and “infection cured using science” begs the question of what kind of story is this, really? If science is the cure, why is there a need for a Chosen One?

Despite its flaws, this is an enjoyable colorful, action-packed apocalyptic story with a little romance that teen girls 12 and older will probably enjoy.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Vault Guest Post: Wither, O’Zombie by Jonathan Maberry

Editor’s note: This guest post was originally written for Monster Librarian and published in April of 2012. A lot has happened since then, so it’s not as current as it could be, but it is still relevant.

WITHER, O’ ZOMBIE?

 

You’ve come a long way, you shambling, lifeless, flesh-eating sack of dead meat.

 

And I say that with deep affection.

 

Look at the way things have changed.  When I was a teenager back in the 1970s, we used to pile into cars to go to the drive-in to see midnight shows of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.  We referred to those monsters as…the living dead. The wisest among us floated the word ‘ghoul’. And that’s what Romero called them. No one had used the Z-word yet.

 

Then in 1978 Romero released his follow-up flick, DAWN OF THE DEAD.  That film includes a single oblique reference to zombies.  Early on in the film, Peter (played by Ken Foree), says, “You know Macumba? Voodoo. My granddad was a priest in Trinidad. He used to tell us, ‘When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth.’”

 

That’s the closest Romero got to calling his monsters ‘zombies’.  It was only after the film was recut by Italian director Dario Argento and released as ‘Zombi: Dawn of the Dead’ that the Z-word became connected to the genre. Once it was there, it was there for good. It didn’t matter that Romero never considered his monsters to be zombies, despite that one reference in DAWN.  They were ghouls to Romero, but for the rest of the world and probably the rest of history, they became zombies.

 

Since DAWN had a much larger release and was a more popular film (color, better acting, higher production values, and Tom Savini’s gruesome make-up effects gave it serious legs), a larger chunk of the mainstream audience began to become aware that there WAS a zombie genre.  Though still loosely referred to as ‘those living dead’ films, the genre was in the process of expanding, with domestic and foreign films popping up everywhere.  Some good (such as LIVING DEAD AT THE MANCHESTER MORGUE), some bad but highly entertaining (TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD), and some so appalling that it hurts my fingers to type their titles. So I won’t.

 

At the same time we had the first wave of zombie literature.  It was John Skipp and Craig Spector who accomplished that with their legendary anthology, BOOK OF THE DEAD, featuring stories by Stephen King and a veritable A-list of horror writers.  The book was a big hit and it proved that there was tremendous depth and scope in the genre.  In his nonfiction book on the horror culture, DANSE MACABRE, Stephen King declared that zombies had become their own trope, as valid and individual as vampires, werewolves, and other notable monsters. He was right.  (Uncle Stevie is often right when it comes to pop culture issues related to horror.)

 

Seven years after DAWN, Romero gave us DAY OF THE DEAD. The original script was ambitious, and it was a biting social commentary on the build-up of Ronald Reagan’s military-industrial complex. Unfortunately Romero didn’t get the budget to shoot the script he wrote. My personal opinion is that his DAY script would have likely resulted in the best damn zombie film ever made. It was Romero’s best writing without a doubt. But the bean counters in Hollywood chickened out. The result is an entertaining, if talky, third entry in the genre. It isn’t my favorite of Romero’s flicks (DAWN holds that spot), and it’s not the worst (SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD owns that trophy). 

 

However it isn’t in the zombie movies that the best zombie storytelling is happening. Zombie books and comics have long since laid claim to the honor of driving the genre forward in the most interesting ways.

 

With Skipp and Spector’s BOOK OF THE DEAD and its sequel, STILL DEAD, standing as the establishing monuments of zombie lit, the bar was set very high.  For the next decade or so the short story was the primary vehicle for fictional zombies.  Then in the late 1990s there was a series of novels based upon and inspired by the Resident Evil video game.  These books, written by noted media tie-in writer S.D. Perry, were very successful and the numbers intrigued publishers who began to scout around for other zombie books.

 

Then came the double-punch of Brian Keene’s THE RISING and Max Brooks’ THE ZOMBIE SURVIVAL GUIDE.  Keene’s book is widely regarded as the novel that kick-started the zombie fiction firestorm. And it’s a corker, too. Rather than riffing on Romero’s zombies, Keene spins the story in a new direction, bringing in demons from the outer darkness. These books are thrilling, action packed and depressing enough to warrant being sold with a bottle of Prozac. Keene is a ‘take no prisoners’ kind of writer.

 

Brooks, on the other hand, was a comedy writer for SNL (and the son of Mel Brooks). He took a standard survival guide and rewrote it as a tongue-in-cheek manual for how to survive a zombie apocalypse. The fact that it’s played with a straight face sells it, and the book became a massive hit that crossed genre lines to sell deeply into the mainstream market. Well over a million copies have been sold.

 

Based on the strength of these two landmark books, the floodgates were opened for zombie literature.

 

Keene went on to write sequels to THE RISING, and even a Romero-esque standalone, DEAD SEA.  He’s since moved onto other areas of horror and continues to scare the bejeezus out of his well-earned legion of rabid fans.  (I count myself lucky to be both a fan and a friend of Brian’s. Had it not been for THE RISING, I doubt I would have tried my hand at zombie fiction.)

 

Max Brooks switched to fiction and wrote WORLD WAR Z, which is one of the most successful zombie novels ever written.  WWZ is also a landmark book in that it is far from being a gore-soaked adventure novel. In fact, it starts ten years AFTER the zombie war is won.  The whole story is written in what –in other hands—would be a dry style: a series of interviews conducted by an historian who is writing a socio-political account of the zombie outbreak, its spread, the near-apocalyptic war, and the aftermath.  This book stands as one of the most insightful books on modern politics, and it’s proof positive that allegory and metaphor are solidly at the heart of the zombie genre.

 

With those two books serving as guideposts, the zombie literary scene was ignited. The genre blew up so fast and so big that it’s impossible to create a definitive list of subgenres.  However here are some notable works that are, in their way, crucial milestones in the ever-evolving world of zombie lit.

 

BREATHERS: A Zombie’s Lament by S. G. Browne is biting social commentary, told from the point of view of a recently reanimated corpse.

 

PLAY DEAD by Ryan Brown is a sports novel with zombies. Dark humor, lots of action.

 

THE FOREST OF HANDS AND TEETH by Carrie Ryan is the first dystopian zombie novel for teens; and the first of a series.

 

BONESHAKER by Cherie Priest is a wild mash-up of Steampunk, apocalyptic action, science fiction, and fantasy.

 

DEAD CITY by Joe McKinney is an action novel with a strong message about the failure of government infrastructure during catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina. McKinney injected pure adrenaline into the genre.

 

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES by Seth Grahame-Smith is a collision of classic literature and flesh-chomping horror. It was so wildly successful that it’s regarded as the best-selling zombie novel of all time as well as the book that kicked-off the literature/monsters mash-up genre.

 

MONSTER ISLAND by David Wellington is the first of a gritty, intelligent trilogy of novels that combines elements of dark fantasy with global politics.

 

GENERATION DEAD by Daniel Waters is the first teen angst novel featuring zombies.

 

PATIENT ZERO by Jonathan Maberry (yeah, that’s me) was the first action-oriented technothriller to feature zombies.  It launched the Joe Ledger series of weird-science thrillers.

 

AUTUMN by David Moody, the first in a series of zombie novels that takes the genre in a fascinating new direction.  If John Wyndham was alive and wrote zombie novels, they’d read like this.

 

DAY BY DAY ARMAGEDDON by J. L. Bourne is the first of a series of geo-political military thrillers set during a zombie apocalypse.

 

THE MORNINGSTAR STRAIN by Z.A. Recht is a series written by the late (and much missed Zach Recht) that explores the nuances of a global pandemic.

 

DYING TO LIVE by Kim Paffenroth is a series of zombie novels that explores the spiritual implications of the apocalypse.

 

XOMBIES by Walter Greatshell is one of the first major novels in the genre to focus on the female point of view.  Great stuff.

 

Of course there are many other zombie books, some of great note, others less so, but in terms of impact on the genre, these books are all landmark.

 

So…where does the genre go from here?

 

That’s a good question.  The genre lends itself to reinvention. The variety of storytelling we’ve had so far proves that.  If you take any single subgenre mentioned above and read the other books in that specific subgenre, you will seldom find significant similarities. Take the Young Adult genre for example. Carrie Ryan’s FOREST OF HANDS AND TEETH is radically different from Alden Bell’s THE REAPERS ARE THE ANGELS, just as that is different from Charlie Higson’s THE ENEMY, and my own ROT & RUIN books.

 

You see, this unlimited variety comes from the nature of the monster itself. The zombie, with very few exceptions, has no personality. It is ‘The Threat’. It’s a symbol, a metaphor for other things that we’re afraid of, and since each of us is afraid of different things, and afraid of those things in uniquely individual ways, each book reflects that individuality. As long as we are frail humans with our many fears and vulnerabilities, we will always want to explore how those weakness or threats can be addressed and (ideally) understood and conquered. That’s pretty much the basis for all true drama right there.

 

I even put a new topspin on the ‘Zombie Outbreak’ subgenre with DEAD OF NIGHT, my latest novel. That book deals with a modern catastrophe that grows out of the misuse of Cold War bioweapons research. It was the fourth zombie novel I’d written, and it’s not even remotely similar to my other books. The genre is like that. Always different, always changing.

 

So…trends in zombie fiction?  Anything.  Everything.

 

Keep reading…it’s going to continue to be pretty damn exciting.

 

-Jonathan Maberry

April 2012

 

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Jonathan Maberry is a New York Times bestseller and multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning author, editor and Marvel Comics writer.  He has written pre-apocalypse novels: Ghost Road Blues, Dead Man’s Song, Bad Moon Rising, Patient Zero, and The Dragon Factory; an apocalypse novel, Dead Man’s Song; apocalypse comics: Marvel Universe vs the Punisher and Marvel Universe vs Wolverine; and post-apocalyptic novel, Rot & Ruin, Dust & Decay, and Flesh & Bone. He hasn’t tackled Dystopian fiction yet…but you can pretty much assume he will.  Find him online at www.jonathanmaberry.com and on Twitter, Facebook and GoodReads.

 

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DEAD OF NIGHT by NY Times best-seller Jonathan Maberry

St. Martin’s Griffin; available in trade paperback, hardcover, e-book and audio

 

A prison doctor injects a condemned serial killer with a formula designed to keep his consciousness awake while his body rots in the grave.  But all drugs have unforeseen side-effects.  Before he could be buried, the killer wakes up.  Hungry.  Infected.  Contagious.

 

Small town cop Dez Fox and her partner JT are caught in a wave of murder as everyone they know and love die…only to rise again as the ravenous living dead.  If Dez and JT can’t contain the plague inside the town limits, the infection will spread beyond all control.

 

This is the way the world ends.  Not with a bang…but a bite.

 

Praise for DEAD OF NIGHT:

 

 

“Jonathan Maberry is the top gun when it comes to zombies, and with DEAD OF NIGHT, he’s at the top of his game.  Frankly, I’m shocked by how effortlessly he moves between the lofty intellectual heights of T.S. Eliot’s poetry and the savage carnality of the kill.  DEAD OF NIGHT develops with the fevered pace of a manhunt, and yet still manages to hit all the right notes.  Strap in, because Maberry’s latest is one hell of a wild ride.  I loved it.” – Joe McKinney, author of Dead City and FLESH EATERS

 

“Jonathan Maberry has created an homage to death itself and an homage to the undead that is as poetic as it is terrifying.  It’s a brand new and intriguingly fresh slant on the zombie genre that we all love!” -John A. Russo co-screenwriter of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

 

“Maberry is a master at writing scenes that surge and hum with tension.  The pacing is relentless.  He presses the accelerator to the floor and never lets up, taking you on a ride that leaves your heart pounding.  It’s almost impossible to put this book down.  Dead of Night is an excellent read.”  —S.G. Browne, author of BREATHERS

 

“It would be enough to say that Jonathan Maberry had topped himself yet again with an epic zombie novel that is as much fun as it is terrifying.  But that he has also created a story of such tremendous heart and social relevance only further cements his place as a master of the genre.  It also doesn’t hurt that in DEAD OF NIGHT he has created one of the most compelling heroines I’ve read in years.  Dead of Night blew me away!”  –Ryan Brown – Author of PLAY DEAD

 

“Once again, Jonathan Maberry does what he does best; Take proven science, synthesize it and create something truly terrifying.  In DEAD OF NIGHT, Maberry lays the groundwork for a Bioweapon that could very well create zombies in the real world.  Combining great characters (I fell in love with Dez Fox from the moment she was introduced) and taut, blindingly fast action, DEAD OF NIGHT, is a runaway bullet train of a ride. This is Jonathan Maberry’s best writing yet.” –Greg Schauer, owner Between Books, Claymont, DE

 

“Dead of Night stands drooped head and lurching shoulders above most zombie novels. The nightmare increases exponentially – from minor outbreak to major crisis with unstoppable speed, building to a heart-stopping climax you won’t be able to put down.” –David Moody, author of the HATER and AUTUMN books

 

 

Musings: Thoughts on Why There Aren’t More Male Protagonists in YA Horror

Over at Ginger Nuts of Horror, school librarian and YA dark fiction reviewer Tony Jones gave his thoughts on why there aren’t more strong male protagonists in current young adult dark fiction.  You should read his article first, because these are my thoughts after reading it. Tony knows a lot more than I do about YA horror, but Monster Librarian has been around since 2005 and I’ve read and written about a fair amount of YA and middle grade horror in that time period. Here’s a list of titles I put together in June, and as you can see, most of them are not very recent.

Tony suggests that the paranormal romance trend kicked off by Twilight at about that time turned a lot of boys off from reading horror, and I’m sure that was true,  at the time. In 2019, though, some teenagers might not even be aware of Twilight (quote from my daughter: “I’m not sure what it’s about. Doesn’t it have a black cover with a disembodied hand holding an apple?”). Amelia Atwater-Rhodes was a big name before Stephenie Meyer came along, and what kid knows her books now?  There were a couple of other trends that hit in the 2000s as well, the biggest one being Harry Potter. I will say that in 1999 I never would have guessed it would take of like it did, but Harry Potter has had an enduring effect on fantasy literature, complete with fearsome and bizarre creatures and terrifying sorcerers. That kind of fantasy quest fiction with a dark edge overwhemed a lot of the series horror popular in the 1990s with fantasy quest knockoffs. Tony brought up The Hunger Games as an influence, and we did start seeing a lot of dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction around that time, with zombies becoming popular as well. There was more focus on relationships, and sometimes romance, but there were probably at least an equal number of zombie and dystopian titles with girls and boys as protagonists.

So what’s happening now that is different? Well, we’ve kind of moved through that fear of a far future apocalypse because it seems imminent, and the problems and fears kids are facing today have once again changed. And one of the ways they have changed is that the fears of girls, women, and other marginalized groups are taking up space that they didn’t before. and privilege has complicated the dynamic.  A lot of the books we see coming out have to do with agency being stolen, reproductive rights being limited, and things that are spinning out of control for people who already didn’t have much. With women writing most of YA horror, I’m guessing that’s where much of the horror lies.  Privilege is more complicated than just that, though, as evidenced by the clueless half-white, half Puerto Rican female protagonist from Vermont in her interactions with Puerto Rican residents in Five Midnights by Ann Cardinal Davila or wealthy Hanna and undocumented Nick in Gemina by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. It is possible to write characters of teenage boys with nuance, and as the mother of a teenage boy, I am desperate to see it.  The #OwnVoices movement, focused on finding and publishing diverse stories by diverse authors, especially in children’s and young adult literature, has also picked up some steam. Pitch Dark by Courtney Alameda is a great example of that, with both male and female point of view characters.

I agree with Tony that there are a lot of kids who skip straight from Goosebumps to Stephen King: in fact, research by Jo Worthy from more than 20 years back documents conversations between middle schoolers who do. In fact, teen readers are even likely to read and recommend adult fiction to their peers, if the “YA Council Recommends” shelves at my public library are any indication. At the same time, there are plenty of kids who don’t want to make that jump all at once. The Last Kids on Earth, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and Captain Underpants  remain popular at the middle school level, and graphic novels of any kind are constantly checking out.  Rick Riordan’s quest narratives also stay popular, because they allow kids to gradually level up, with the first Percy Jackson series appropriate for elementary kids and the most recent series, Trials of Apolloof interest even to adults. Riordan isn’t writing horror, although there are certainly horrific and gruesome elements in his work, as well as comedy and in-jokes. Even when Riordan has a male point of view character, though, we get to see the uncertainties and growth that take place in his protagonists– they aren’t stock characters. Kids devour those books– I have been hearing about the release of the newest one for what feels like eons now.

Back to those kids who skip over YA and go straight to the adult stuff: while lots of us may remember reading adult horror at a relatively young age, it probably wasn’t checked out from the school library. It’s not a recent thing that middle school libraries aren’t stocking Stephen King. If you headed over to the high school in my community, it looks like they have his complete collection, but while an informal poll I did awhile back showed that Gen Xers and millenials as young as 8 had read IT, that doesn’t mean they were getting it at their school library, or even that they’d want to, and definitely they are not finding in in the middle school collections here. Some books are “underground reading”, the kind that you want to pass around with your friends without actually telling the adults in your life about, and Stephen King, before he gained respectability, used to be one of those authors. Roland Smith writes “creature thriller” type books, such as the Cryptid Hunters series and others of his books, but there’s not much in YA horror that I can find for those who love the “man vs. nature” conflict. There doesn’t seem to be a Guy N. Smith for the YA crowd (if there is, I want to know). Those readers do really have to move on to the kinds of titles that used to be found in the horror sections of used bookstores.

 

Reading choices made by my 13 year old son: Anthony Horowitz (chosen but not read) Shadow Girl (read only at home) Chronicles of Elementia (his favorite book ever, at least on Monday) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Tony also discusses the gendering of book covers. It really is true that people judge books by their covers. Tony suggests that girls are more likely to pick up a book with a cover that is designed to appeal to boys than the other way around. That may be true in some cases, but I don’t think that is necessarily the case. Kids look for clues from book covers. I’ve got The Word Is Murder by Anthony Horowitz sitting next to my sofa. It has a black cover with a shiny knife and a pencil on the front. The cover is what got my son to bring it home (not read it, but bring it home), and my daughter instantly backed away.  I also have a copy of Shadow Girl by Kate Ristau, which has an orange cover with a black silhouette of a girl on it. He read this one secretly (he even tried to hide it from me) but wouldn’t take it out of the house.  I feel like a lot of this is a cultural issue– that boys might be more likely to pick up books with girls on the cover if they didn’t think other kids would embarrass them for doing so.  It’s sad that boys and girls are shamed for things like the art on the book they’re reading.

There are many fewer male protagonists in YA horror, for sure. It would be great to see this disparity addressed, but as publishers work on increasing diversity I think this is something that is going to require thoughtful discussion in the YA literature community, as there is a feeling right now that publishing has been centering male protagonists and male authors for long enough. Rudine Sims Bishop writes that books should be both windows and mirrors, which is a great analogy, but Uma Krishnaswami takes it a step further and suggests that they can be prisms: not just showing an unfamiliar world or reflecting your own back exactly, but looking at things from a different perspective. I see this as the way that YA is going to have to move in order for boys to find themselves once again as heroes in horror fiction.