It's the characters that resonate in this thrilling tale of parental love in a world overrun with zombies
The biggest tropes in fiction get worked into the ground. Vampires, conspiracy theories, BDSM erotica: it's hard to tell new stories in these genres, and even harder to write something that captures the public imagination as the originals did.
Over the last couple of years, we've been exhausting another imaginative seam: zombies. Having risen to popularity thanks to George A Romero's films in the 1970s, they were wheeled out every few years to shamble and moan and eat brains. Recently, there have been some innovative treatments: Seth Graham-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies retconned them into Austen's world; 28 Days Later, The Walking Dead and World War Z concentrated on the human side of what happens when zombies take over the world; and Colson Whitehead's incredible novel Zone One showed the brutality of a world forced to react to such an outbreak. But is there any meat left on the corpse?
I'd assumed not, but The Girl With All the Gifts proves how wrong I was. MJ Carey has written as original, thrilling and powerful a novel as anything I've read in a long time.
Melanie is a little girl who goes to school, has friends, loves books. She is incredibly intelligent, and, we discover, lives underground in an army base with 20 or so other children her age. She is muzzled occasionally, and chained to her desk; and all the classes are tests, to see what information the children retain and understand. But she is a normal child, right up until the moment she smells human flesh too closely – and turns into a feral monster. Melanie, like the other children she lives with, is a zombie; the planet has been overrun, and these intelligent kids are the only possible way for its remaining scientists to find a cure.
We see this world not only through Melanie's eyes, but also those of Miss Justineau, her favourite teacher, who introduces her to Greek myths (including the story of the original girl with all the gifts, Pandora, and the box she opens). Then there's Sergeant Parks, the man in charge of the base, and Caroline Caldwell, the scientist who wants to open up Melanie's skull to find out why she's so intelligent when the rest of the zombie population is of the standard droolingly mindless variety.
Make no mistake, this isn't a book about the zombie outbreak itself, or the world left in its wake (though both are covered, and are fascinating in their own right); it's about this very specific group of people. The way the characters are drawn is reminiscent of classic horror novels such as Richard Matheson's I Am Legend or early Stephen King, but the novel itself isn't a horror. If anything, it's a parental love story – about a child deprived of parents and an adult who wishes to fulfil that role, and how they go about learning to trust each other.
Were the characters not so strong, the book might fall apart. The plot is rather slight (and reminiscent, inevitably, of so many other zombie tales), and the ending feels a little rushed; but the characters – especially Melanie and Miss Justineau – are so well drawn and so human that it's impossible not to feel for them. That's a testament to Carey's skill: not every writer can make you feel emotionally attached to a genius-level undead 10-year-old. But then, not every zombie novel can make you forget that you were sick of the genre in the first place.
• James Smythe's The Echo is published by Harper Voyager. Reported by guardian.co.uk 12 hours ago.
The biggest tropes in fiction get worked into the ground. Vampires, conspiracy theories, BDSM erotica: it's hard to tell new stories in these genres, and even harder to write something that captures the public imagination as the originals did.
Over the last couple of years, we've been exhausting another imaginative seam: zombies. Having risen to popularity thanks to George A Romero's films in the 1970s, they were wheeled out every few years to shamble and moan and eat brains. Recently, there have been some innovative treatments: Seth Graham-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies retconned them into Austen's world; 28 Days Later, The Walking Dead and World War Z concentrated on the human side of what happens when zombies take over the world; and Colson Whitehead's incredible novel Zone One showed the brutality of a world forced to react to such an outbreak. But is there any meat left on the corpse?
I'd assumed not, but The Girl With All the Gifts proves how wrong I was. MJ Carey has written as original, thrilling and powerful a novel as anything I've read in a long time.
Melanie is a little girl who goes to school, has friends, loves books. She is incredibly intelligent, and, we discover, lives underground in an army base with 20 or so other children her age. She is muzzled occasionally, and chained to her desk; and all the classes are tests, to see what information the children retain and understand. But she is a normal child, right up until the moment she smells human flesh too closely – and turns into a feral monster. Melanie, like the other children she lives with, is a zombie; the planet has been overrun, and these intelligent kids are the only possible way for its remaining scientists to find a cure.
We see this world not only through Melanie's eyes, but also those of Miss Justineau, her favourite teacher, who introduces her to Greek myths (including the story of the original girl with all the gifts, Pandora, and the box she opens). Then there's Sergeant Parks, the man in charge of the base, and Caroline Caldwell, the scientist who wants to open up Melanie's skull to find out why she's so intelligent when the rest of the zombie population is of the standard droolingly mindless variety.
Make no mistake, this isn't a book about the zombie outbreak itself, or the world left in its wake (though both are covered, and are fascinating in their own right); it's about this very specific group of people. The way the characters are drawn is reminiscent of classic horror novels such as Richard Matheson's I Am Legend or early Stephen King, but the novel itself isn't a horror. If anything, it's a parental love story – about a child deprived of parents and an adult who wishes to fulfil that role, and how they go about learning to trust each other.
Were the characters not so strong, the book might fall apart. The plot is rather slight (and reminiscent, inevitably, of so many other zombie tales), and the ending feels a little rushed; but the characters – especially Melanie and Miss Justineau – are so well drawn and so human that it's impossible not to feel for them. That's a testament to Carey's skill: not every writer can make you feel emotionally attached to a genius-level undead 10-year-old. But then, not every zombie novel can make you forget that you were sick of the genre in the first place.
• James Smythe's The Echo is published by Harper Voyager. Reported by guardian.co.uk 12 hours ago.
