Breaking Water by Indrapramit Das
My rating: 3/5 cats
Krishna didn’t know much about how washed-up, likely murder victims were handled, but he was sure just cremating them without a thought wasn’t how it usually went.
this is one of those zombie stories that is more concerned with questions of humanity than questions of zombies. which is nothing new: zombie-crisis-as-springboard-for-philosophical-ruminations makes up roughly 45% of all zombie stories. and i usually enjoy the use of zombies to explore or illuminate more…universal human concerns, but this one gave me only medium enjoyment.
maybe i’ve just reached my zombie-saturation level, but this one didn’t bring anything new to the groaning board of my zombie apocalypse. most everyone else i know on here loved it, so i probably just read it wrong, but never has a tor short seemed so long. and this is all sounding harsher than i mean—i didn’t hate it, and i even enjoyed some of the very straightforward prose—The air you breathed felt different when you knew the dead walked around you. but every time there was a new, numbered, part, i was in-my-head-shouting “how many parts are there gonna BE, jeeeez?”
answer: 5. there are 5 numbered parts.
so no one else will have to wonder.
i appreciate that it is set in india, which is not common, and a wholly different climate to inflict upon a walking corpse (this story has some extra-icky decomp), and i appreciate what it has to say about our responsibility to other humans, whether they are alive or not, and the sanctity of the body, and the way reverence can be replaced, made prosaic by paperwork. but then it just went on. and on and on and on and i got a little bored. i didn’t always understand the character’s motivations or what the ultimate takeaway was meant to be, but there was good stuff sprinkled around in there, i just wish it had been shorter and tighter or longer and more thoroughly explicated. and also featured some unicorns, while i’m just tossing wishes into the darkness.
anyway, i read it wrong. you probably won’t.
read it for yourself here:
http://www.tor.com/2016/02/10/breakin…
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