Reviews and Comments

"Nobody here needs the exposition."

If only the exposition were the problem with Deadline, but it isn't. Instead, in style it's the repetition, in themes the classism (with undertones of unintentional racism and sexism). Fortunately the substance is all right, so I can easily see people digging Deadline, but it annoyed the unliving hell out of me.

First, this book badly needs an editor. The protagonist's mental problems, though kind of interesting, are hammered home so repetitively that the reader will get annoyed the fifth, or sixth, or twentieth time they're brought up, as well as the other characters reacting to it. We get it, your readers really aren't quite as stupid as that.

Second, this is a catastrophe story where the survivors are the happy 1% who have their fortified mansions, who have the President on speed-dial, who were born with all the privileges and advantages that made it possible to survive the zombie apocalypse. Everybody's so damn special it starts to grate after a while. Even though it makes sense the annoying rich are most likely to survive a cataclysm like the one described, the less fortunate only merit about a single off-hand mention: otherwise it's rich assholes all the way down. Maybe the whole thing wasn't quite as tone-deaf fifteen years ago, but it certainly reads that way now. When reading about how Shaun feels happy and safe among trigger-happy redneck truckers who will shoot anyone who as much as looks like a zombie, it's hard not to suspect that anyone with the wrong skin tone did, in fact, probably get shot as one, just as a precaution, y'know. Again: this is certainly unintended, but knowing what we now know about America, that is the way it reads, but it's never addressed.

There are interesting points to be made on surveillance, security and fear in society, and actually the theme of a society living in constant fear and letting that fear define pretty much everything was interesting and not badly handled. The writing certainly wasn't clumsy (even though it did keep repeating itself) and I found the story gripping. But then there is the subtext that Sex = Evil, Guns & Violence = Good, and we're so deep in murky American values that I almost couldn't keep reading. Again: zombie novel, so the values sort of come with the territory, but I'm betting none of that was intentional. Or maybe it was. Maybe I'm missing some clever satire here, it wouldn't be the first time.