New Book: Eric Side Steps

To avoid this turning into one book in 52 weeks I have set aside Tristam Shandy and have gone for the powerful cleansing of Brian Keene's The Rising.

I have always liked the Leisure Publishing Horror line. I feel it's very diverse with many different kinds of horror, from the super natural to the non-supernatural yet still horrific (see nearly everything by Jack Ketchum). They also have a tendency to reprint things which you can normally only find in specialist press in inexpensive mass market editions, something which I greatly appreciate because the thought of paying $40 for 100 pages of story is just a bit insane to me. This gives me and others the ability to read these great stories. I have a few issues with the series as well but I'll leave that for another time.

I was drawn to Brian Keene's The Rising not because I'm a fan of zombies or zombie fiction. Frankly, I think I'm a bit over zombies. Yes, they're neat and in the right hands can represent all kinds of modern and post-modern fears while also showing the strength of humanity is in the drive to survive. It is also great for a genre because we get to see people far worse off than us.

Schadenfreude as emotional comfort.

I picked it up because there was a great interview with the author in Cemetery Dance, a "quarterly" horror fiction publication. The author talked abit about his philosophy of horror and writing in general and it marked him as "one to keep an eye on" for future purchases. So when Dorchester publishing (who owns the Leisure line) ran a $1 sale, I picked up a few of his books, including the sequel to this book. Not having the original, I left it to the side.

The Rising is about the zombiepocalypse but thankfully not the shuffling dead brainless flesh eaters. Instead these reanimated corpses are brought to re-life by the consciousness of so far unnamed entities. We're given to believe that they're demons, but I think that they're actually bitter Angels.

The rules laid out are you die, you get possessed. When you're possessed the inhabitor gains access to your memories and therefore the possesor gets your skill sets. So if you knew how to fire a gun, the new undead you can fire a gun. However there is a scene where an undead baby is found in a baby seat but it can't get out of the straps because it didn't know how when it was alive. The hosts have a base set of skills as well, including knowledge of dead languages and the like but that's not well developed yet.

When turned, the zombies kill others, eat them, but the flesh is sublimated, not digested. They always make certain to leave the host bodies mobile so that the corpse can be reanimated and move around.

Even animals can become possessed. There's a great sequence early on in a Zoo where in a gang of stereotypes are dispatched by things like undead lions, anacondas, and such. Sadly, no zombie gorillas. There is also another sequence with a goldfish, which sadly made me think of Klaus from American Dad!

The writing is very breezy. I picked it up at lunch and started reading it on the train home and a bit before bed and i'm on page 129 of 321 (compared to page 25 of Tristam Shandy). There are moments of gore, but nothing really uncomfortable like in the works of Edward Lee who has made me queasy a few times.

I'm also pleasently surprised to find this isn't just a generic zombipocalypse novel (most of which reads like Fulci fan fic at best) but that there's an attempt to introduce a new mythology to the genre.

So far, I'm QUITE pleased and will probably wrap this book today or tomorrow.