The Reapers are the Angels by Alden Bell
My rating: 5/5 cats
i was intrigued by this book, until i read mike reynolds’ devastatingly negative review of it, and it got shunted to the mental back burner. but eventually i remembered that i am not as smart as mike reynolds, and i am content with playing with little glass paperweights refracting in the sunlight while giggling, so i read it after all. and i loved it.
i lovingly thumb my nose at the negative reviews. and then duck.
this isn’t a YA novel, although many reviewers have decided it is. and that’s fair – the protagonist is fifteen, and the pacing matches that of a YA novel. but my barnes and noble overlord classifies it as adult, and we all know they would never make a classification error. so let’s call it an adult novel so as not to scare off the old stuffy types, and the rest of you, i will just “shh, yeah, i know.”
and i have to admit, i have only read one flannery o’connor book (for shame!!) although i have seen wise blood because, well, duh:
but so as far as the “derivative” accusations go, i am as clean-wooled as a baby lamb. but i plan on reading more of her soon, i swear.
this is basically the kind of book i love – the gothic-western justice-novel, but with some supernatural spice. it is more or less true grit with zombies. temple speechifies in roughly the same biblical manner – with a mixture of retributive old testament and a soft sticky center of love thy (deserving) neighbor, jesus-style; a mixture of poor grammar and poetic resonance. i love her character. she is eminently capable, running from her past and her mistakes which haunt her way more than any slow-shambling zombies, which act more as set-pieces than as any real threat.it is fairly episodic, and the basic theme is about the path to forgiveness and redemption, and the progression of that kind of grieving, healing process, but let’s not forget, there are also zombies, so it isn’t all whiny mitch albom stuff.
what is great about this book is that temple was born into this world. she has never known a world without desolation, without monsters, without danger or the necessity of moving on. she is unattached and detached, but retains some inherent glimmer of humanity that constitutes her own moral compass. and it is gorgeous to watch a girl operate under the weight of her guilt and the necessity of her survival instincts. she does not take any shit, but she is not without empathy. nor without understanding of other people’s personal moral code, even as it works against her.
also great is that, starting the way this one does, in the waning years of an infestation, we do not have to read any boring scenes where people have a slow dawning realization of the situation. we are thrust into a world that is, not that is becoming.
i love it i love it i love it.
it is exactly what i needed to be reading – a “horror” novel that has more depth than just “braaaaains,” one one whose themes are smack in my area of interest. plus, tom franklin (my new love in life) blurbed this puppy.
