San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats by Mira Grant
My rating: 4/5 cats
how do there keep being more of these?? and they aren’t even new, i am just only now discovering them, like when you take your winter coat out of storage (or in my case “flung behind the door that is really just for show because of all the stacks of books preventing it from opening) and finding twenty dollars in the pocket. IT WAS THERE ALL ALOOOONG!
there is, indeed, a door behind there.
and although this one was in no way as satisfying as countdown, which actually contributed something vital to the newsflesh series, while this one is more of a “what-if” writing exercise seemingly created just as a fan-gift by someone who knows her demographic, it is completely worth reading, because i cannot return to this world frequently enough. i am always ready for more zombiestories from ms grant. always.
so this one is about “what if zombies were locked into comic-con and did the things that zombies do??” and while i have never personally been to comic-con (MOCCA is about as much as i can handle), it sounds like she knows what she is talking about, and i definitely appreciated the little bits of detail that i understood, while acknowledging that i probably missed a lot of the references.
the problematic thing about this one is all to do with the structure. it takes place at a remove, as many years later mahir gowda, our beloved reporter, interviews lorelei tutt, the only survivor of the attack, who had been at the time a teenager sulking off to the hotel for a nap while her parents set up their booth with their friends, all of whom would become victims of the event in one way or another.
so, with no survivors, all the “flashback” sequences are necessarily extrapolated from security camera footage and cell phone conversations and the like, and many of the scenes could not have been observed or reported by any of the available means, which is a little strange for a writer who usually goes to such great lengths with her details and her research, but if you are seriously going to bitch about verité in a zombie-attack novella that takes place at comic-con, you are totally missing the spirit of the exercise.
because some of the best-written scenes are these ones that could not have been recorded, only imagined. the legally-blind woman in the engineering room with her helper dog, the television star/geek-icon rising to the challenge, the various small heroisms and unfortunate mistakes…it’s all great material. and the fact that she seems to be able to churn this stuff out and revisit the same basic situation while always keeping it fresh rather than just rehashing old scenes excites me. so even though it is not my favorite extra-newsflesh thingie she has written, it is well worth the reading, and i am incredibly excited to know that there are (still, somehow) more of these out there for me to read.
thank you, mira grant…
read my book reviews on goodreads
