Home with my sick daughter and feeling like a pile o' excrement myself, I had some time to finish Carrie Ryan's The Forest of Hands and Teeth today.
Last week I caused a bit of a kerfuffle by suggesting that this book's cover might scare away male readers. Apparently not seeing the boy appeal in this cover makes me some kind of horrible anti-feminist, or anti-boy, or just an idiot.
So let me say this: this is an action-packed thrill ride of a book that also happens to be thoughtful and well-written, two qualities that are all too rare in my beloved horror genre. And it is poorly served by a dull cover that suggests, all questions of gender aside, that the book is dull and contemplative. Honestly, this could have been the cover of The Shipping News or something. I know, that's about a guy, but you know what I mean. This looks like a literary novel in which emotionally cold characters do a lot of thinking instead of a novel in which our axe-wielding heroine cuts down scores of zombies! Couldn't we at least have Gabrielle's menacing flash of red in the distance or something?
This is an excellent horror novel. It does not transcend its genre. It exemplifies all the best that horror is capable of--not just cheap thrills but a real examination of issues of life and death that other genres often shy away from. It's also got a lot to chew on with regards to love, religion, and the power of stories. I recommend it to kids of both genres or anyone who enjoys a good, suspenseful story. No one should be scared away by the incredibly crappy cover.
Given that the blurb at the top of the back cover calls this "a postapolcalyptic romance", which I don't think is accurate, and the cover is all about wisps of blowing hair, it seems fairly clear that the publisher was trying to position this as a kind of "You've read Twilight, now read this!" book. "It's like Twilight, only, you know, with zombies instead of vampires!" This, again, is inaccurate and frankly looks desperate on the part of the publisher. I don't know why they didn't have confidence in the book as it is, but you should: it's a really good book.
Briefly, ladies and gentlemen, let us now pause and praise George Romero. I'd be hard pressed to name a single person who's had a bigger influence on popular culture. (But maybe one springs to your mind--leave a comment and say who it is, then!) I think I saw this metaphor somewhere else, so apologies to whoever I'm stealing it from, but this is the man who created the sandbox that so many other artists have been playing in for 40 years. There were movies with "zombie" in the title before Night of the Living Dead--movies like White Zombie and I Walked With a Zombie, which is fantastic, but the shuffling undead hungry for your flesh who can turn you with a bite is Romero's invention. In addition to his own living dead movies (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead, and Untitled Dead Sequel Currently Filming in Toronto), he essentially created the universe in which the following movies take place: Return of the Living Dead, Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Fido, Quarantine, the forthcoming Dead Snow (with Nazi zombies. Nazi zombies, I say! I want to see this right now!) and the Resident Evil movies, which spring from the Resident Evil videogame. Other videogames that I know of are House of the Dead 1-3, Left 4 Dead, and the iphone's wonderfully addictive Zombieville USA. I'm sure there are many more as well. Books include Nightshade Books' Living Dead anthology, Max Brooks' World War Z, the amazing comic book series The Walking Dead, and Carrie Ryan's The Forest of Hands and Teeth.
You get the idea. Usually we wait until somebody dies to praise them and their body of work, but let's not do that with George Romero, okay? If you've enjoyed any of the above entertainments, you owe hours of fun to George Romero's imagination. He rocks.
Finally, a quibble about the book. SPOILERS! THIS PART IS ONLY FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE ALREADY READ THE BOOK! GO READ IT AND COME BACK!
Despite another blurb on the back advertising this as "sexy" (I disagree), sex is absent to a pretty weird degree in this book. When Travis is sick and Mary hides in his bed and straddles him briefly on her way out, yeah, we can feel the heat. But then later, in their 3-story home, they live together, and it's not clear whether they've done it. Sexual congress, I mean, not zombie killing.
Anyway, given their whole forbidden love thing, it seems odd that when they are finally alone with only a dog for company, Mary and Travis are not all over each other all the time. To be fair, this may have been mentioned in passing, but I was reading very quickly. I guess I expected a few pages about how, alone at last, they finally got biz-ay. This is not just because I'm a perv, but because in the context of what's come before, it seems odd that we don't even really see them kiss here, that their love doesn't appear to have a physical dimension at all. I know a lot of publishers are very leery of sex in YA books for fear that librarians in areas where thoughtful people live in fear of religious fanatics won't stock the books, so this may well have been an editorial decision. Given the Twilight fetish in the marketing, they may have wanted to put out another abstinence fable.
I would like to see more models of responsible, loving sexual behavior in YA books. In the current climate, it seems it's okay to write about sexual assault, or sexual behavior as a pathology that must be overcome, but not just the regular old sex that so many teens engage in.
