Broken Lands by Jonathan Maberry

Simon and Schuster, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-1534406377

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook

I will be honest, I am not a fan of zombie fiction.  As a reviewer, I am putting my feelings about the genre as a whole to the side to review Broken Lands because it is on the final ballot for the 2018 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel. I know Jonathan Maberry is a talented author whose work in both the adult and young adult categories has been judged as outstanding, not just in the community of people who write horror fiction or love zombie fiction but by other reviewers, including librarians (and librarians are not an easy audience to impress).

Broken Lands is the first book in a follow-up series to Maberry’s YA series Rot and Ruin. That series introduced backstory on how and why the apocalypse happened and introduced the teenage Benny Imura as a main character. Previous to writing the Rot and Ruin books, Maberry wrote adult zombie fiction starring a special ops soldier, Joe Ledger. I have not read either the Rot and Ruin books or the Joe Ledger books, so Broken Lands is my introduction to Benny and his friends and to Joe. Benny and Joe each have their own, narratives, which alternate with a third narrative involving Gutsy Gomez, a teenage girl who is uncovering a disturbing secret about her town and its involvement with a secret military base nearby (For purposes of representation, Gutsy is essentially uninterested in sex or romance, although she is described as bi, and she has a kiss with Alice, a lesbian).

The book starts out strong, with an abrupt hook that introduces and characterizes Gutsy and the world she’s living in with just a few words, enough to make even a reluctant reader curious enough to turn the page. Her story mainly takes place in and around New Alamo, a town of indeterminate size in New Mexico that was formerly an internment camp for undocumented immigrants. Maberry takes no time to ratchet up the suspense and action. Short sentences and plenty of white space push the reader on through not just Gutsy’s actions but her thought processes as she observes the cemetery. I wasn’t wild about Maberry’s characterization of grief as something that you work your way through and eventually come out of healed, but his portrayal of Gutsy’s grieving, and how horrific it is to have the person you are grieving come back from the dead to attack you, I thought was spot on. She’s a girl who thinks and acts and doesn’t slow down. Her friends, Alethea and Spider, are loyal and supportive, and secondary characters are developed enough for the reader to care about them, at least a little.

Then we switch to Benny and his friends, in Reclamation, California, a town of about 16,000 people that they helped to defend and rebuild. Reclamation has managed to connect with eight other towns in California and the new American government being established in Asheville, North Carolina, but Asheville has suddenly gone silent, and Joe Ledger, who was on his way from Reclamation to Asheville by helicopter, has disappeared. Benny and his friends decide to steal six “quads” (small four-wheeled vehicles), from the town, tie up the guards on watch duty, and go off to search for Ledger and then on to Asheville. Experienced, tough, and with varying levels of skill in combat, Benny and five friends take off across unknown country. Teenagers do a lot of unwise things, but this choice, for me, went beyond normal levels of maladaptive judgment. I am not a young adult, though: maybe actual teenagers would find this plausible.

My guess is that Maberry wanted us to see what the wasteland beyond California looked like and to get a preview of the zombie hordes that is stomach-dropping dreadful. There is a lot of zombie fighting, including a battle with a zombie silverback gorilla and an absolutely horrific experience in a state prison where the locked-up prisoners, all zombies, are in starvation mode. There’s also observation of their bizarre surroundings, including mutations from chemical spills, bioweapons, and radioactivity, and growing dread as they witness intelligent zombies directing endless hordes of shambling horrors. While Asheville is in the South, Benny and his friends find themselves driven further and further south, towards the Mexican border, because the radioactivity, mutations, and zombies all have to be avoided. And because there are six teenagers in various states of romantic involvement, there’s also teenage drama. It could be that the character development of the teenage characters all occured in the previous series, but aside from Benny (the point of view character) and Chong (who is holding off zombification with medication only available in Asheville) the characters sort of blended together for me.

Finally, we have a storyline where a hunter tracks down Joe Ledger, whose helicopter has crashed, and they turn out to be former comrades. They decide to go to New Alamo to hunt for a weapons cache and then head to Asheville together. I enjoyed the Joe Ledger storyline. I could tell that Maberry was comfortable writing Ledger and it was interesting to watch the relationship between Ledger and his new partner.

All three sets of characters collide as a horde of  hundreds of zombies overtake and burn down the secret military base where scientists have been running experiments on the citizens of New Alamo (because apparently it’s okay to conduct racist, fatal scientific experiments on undocumented immigrants) and head for the walls of the town. Benny and three of his friends sneak in through a tunnel infested with zombies, killing everyone in their path until they reach the interior. Gutsy and her friends and neighbors (about ten of them are named) defend the walls. Ledger wades straight into the middle of the horde and starts cutting zombies down. The hunter, who turns out to be Benny’s older half-brother Sam, uses a sniper rifle to take down zombies one at a time. This small group of people who have not coordinated in any way defeat and kill all the zombies, including any bitten or killed townspeople. Gutsy then discovers the director of the hospital and the leader of the scientists from the military base attempting to escape with the records of their experiments, and stops them. The book ends with a shocking reveal which I can’t give away, but which will definitely send readers after the next book.

My overall impression is that Maberry does a great job creating suspense and action with a very economical use of words, and uses vivid language to describe the mutating, destroyed land that the characters must cross. The grave-robbing and scientific experimentation in New Alamo contributed to a rather heavy-handed critique on immigration policy, but the introduction of Gutsy Gomez, whose experience of these was intensely personal, led it to be a very strong storyline. Here was a girl who put her grief on hold to deal with life-and-death issues and did what had to be done, even at great personal expense. Maberry certainly manages to instill a feeling of dread and horror with the zombie hordes and one-on-one battles, even those that are only implied (the final time Gutsy and her friends have to kill her already dead mother is not depicted, but it doesn’t have to be to get the emotional impact) and the human horror, of what military scientists were willing to do to innocent people, is appalling. It’s not for nothing that Maberry has a reputation as a gifted horror writer.

However, I felt that he depended far too much on his readers’ knowledge of backstory for characters from previous books. As someone who hasn’t read any of Maberry’s zombie books, I felt lost among the characters that carried over from his previous books. The transition between narratives was often clunky, with Maberry spending a long time in one narrative, then cutting out to a different one that I had lost track of, and switching time periods back and forth. I would have liked to see more of a focus on Gutsy’s story (and maybe Ledger’s). Based on the sudden ending, I assume that there is going to be a second book, and perhaps a better choice would have been to focus on Gutsy in this book and Benny in the next (Rick Riordan did this successfully in his Heroes of Olympus books, in which the first book focuses on a newly introduced character and the second switches to a character from the previous series). There is good action and suspense, some pretty raw horror and violence, and some compelling writing and description. Readers of Maberry’s previous books will probably like this one, but it’s not the one to start with, and I suspect it’s not nearly his best work.  Recommended for public libraries, high school library media centers, readers of zombie fiction, readers who enjoyed the Rot and Ruin books, and for Jonathan Maberry fans.

Editor’s note: Broken Lands is on the final ballot for the 2018 Bram Stoker Awards in the category of Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel.