Patient Zero

Popular culture has been fascinated with zombies for a long, long time - I think it's because zombies, unlike other supernatural beings, can be justified through science. At the moment, it's fake science, but a virus that reanimates the meat of a dead person is minutely more probable (in our collective imagination) than a virus that turns you into a wolf. This is speculation on my part, based on the extensive explanations often provided in zombie stories - the rage virus in the 28 Days Later franchise, Max Brooks' examination in World War Z and The Zombie Handbook, and Bill Pullman's turn in The Serpant and the Rainbow, to name a mere handful. Making zombies believable has certainly been more of a focus in zombie media than it has been in, say, vampire media.

This is pretty much the only strength that Jonathan Maberry's Patient Zero has over the plentiful competition.

The novel starts strong with a really neat premise: an Islamic extremist group, backed by a wealthy third party, has developed a highly contagious disease that they intend to release on the American populace. All that stands in their way is a secret government organization (think Men In Black, only with less giving up your entire life) and our Action Hero Joe Ledger. Ledger is part military, part cop, and all badass - his friend-cum-shrink, Randy Sanchez, basically exists to prove how tough and hardened and on the edge of insanity Ledger really is. But you root for him, because he also deals with the terror and sheer bizarreness of the situation.

Ledger is backed mainly by a cast of military personnel, and his personal team is pretty awesome. For the first half of the novel, everyone is tough, ready to rumble, professional, and awesome. They kick ass. Mr. Church, head of the Department of Military Sciences (our super-secret organization) and Major Grace Courtland are a good pair for Ledger to bounce off - collectively, they have enough tactical and practical smarts so that I never felt like leaps of logic were being made without the reader to follow (until the end...but we'll get to that).

It unravels startlingly fast in the second act. It feels as though Maberry loses track of his characterizations; he feels the need to twist his established personalities into several stilted, obvious, and unnecessary storylines, that do nothing for his characters and bog down the pace of the novel. One of his villains, a deliciously amoral representative of the pharmaceutical companies, becomes a completely different person in a really irritating way. The only consistant characters are the most two-dimensional; they can't become something different because there's not a whole lot there to start with.

The other major weakness of the novel is that it changes perspective and place nearly every chapter; this in and of itself is not a criticism, but all of the sections with Ledger are told from a first person perspective while none of the rest of the novel is. This makes the prose tremendously uneven and rather untrustworthy, since the reader doesn't get a consistant narrator to hang on to throughout the story. I understand that to tell the story Maberry obviously wanted to, he can't keep the whole thing in Legder's perspective, but I wish he'd scrapped the first person in favor of a third person omniscient. It would have been smoother AND made more sense.

Long story short: Maberry isn't Max Brooks, and this is no World War Z. I just wish Patient Zero had been satisfying enough on its own that I wouldn't feel the need to make that comparison.

Prospective Reads

I was originally planning to do a fairly academic, drawn out post here about how Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash is not actually cyberpunk, but my smarter-than-me boyfriend has informed me that, in fact, it's categorized as "post-cyberpunk" and not actually the former at all. So. That happened.

(My reasoning was going to be an elegant deconstruction about how the focus of Snow Crash is actually the relationships between people, rather than mankind's relationship to technology and machines, which is what I think the point of pure cyberpunk is. Snow Crash is much more involved in tracing the connecting lines between people, following threads of religion, language, and conformity to show the web that's netting all of us into one big mass of humanity. And then that humanity breeds viruses and programs, I don't know. I stopped outlining what was essentially a college essay when I discovered that this is not a new theory.)

I could ALSO give my excuses for not reading One Hundred Years of Solitude yet, but that one boils down easy: the guy in my office who told me I have to read it, said I need to watch some bizarre film called Gummo first. I haven't watched the film yet, so I haven't read the book yet. I'm going to begin it tentatively, I can tell you that much - I'm no longer intimidated by not finishing books, so if it drags too hard I'm putting it down. But I'm probably being unfair to it; Lord knows that since finishing school I've gotten HELLA lazy in my reading habits.

What I will do is cheerfully tell you to go read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and its sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire. Wonderful character-driven mysteries, and Larsson the author is a master of story-telling. The fact that they are both translations (Swedish to English) didn't actually impact the prose for me, either (I tend to think translations come out a little stiff, but Tattoo and Fire are both fluid and charming).