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.