Books | Lorelei By Starlight

Look, I think that everybody loves zombies at this point, right? Well, at least it seems that way – I mean they are everywhere! They have even invaded the timeless classics, like Pride and Prejudice. I’ve had Jonathan Maberry‘s Patient Zero for a while, and, due to some time off of work recently, finally had time to pick it up and enjoy it.

This book was made for me. I not only love the horror genre, but also really enjoy reading espionage thrillers. Maberry has done a great job of combining both genres. Joe Ledger is an above-average cop, excited about going to Quantico to begin his FBI training, when he is “solicited” by a deep black group for a special project. Zombies are being weaponized for world destruction, and after proving his skills against “patient zero” Joe is brought in to help fight the plague.

I think that the bar on zombie movies was really raised by 28 Days Later, where we were introduced to the fast zombie.

The slow-witted shuffling ones were bad enough, but to have the threat suddenly move, and swarm, faster almost than a human was a recipe for panic. Maberry takes the bar up another notch because these zombies are being experimented on and the infection refined for increased rapidity of change time. Time from being bitten to becoming a zombie is decreased to a rate that promises worldwide infection within days. The possibility of an antidote is dangled tantalizingly, but the fast-change time complicates the potential for administering something like this. Joe and his team are under incredible stress to solve the problem, and the complexity of the situations that move the plot forward were well-planned and definitely made me keep turning the pages.

This is the first work by Maberry that I have read since the trilogy that began with Ghost Road Blues. I was pleasantly surprised by this trilogy, which has many of the common horror tropes, but manages to put some different and interesting twists into the mix. I think that if you are someone who enjoys Stephen King, then you would like these books. They center on a comic book owner in the town of Pine Deep who gets mixed up in a seriously scary situation. The town is best known for its Halloween celebrations each year, but soon becomes the center of a battle between good and evil. There is an otherworldly blues player (complete with a busted up guitar on his back) who must face up against an ancient evil that has been buried deep in a dark part of the forest for years and years. This isn’t their first battle, of course, and many others are pulled into the fray as they fight it out. I think my favorite part is the re-creation of the ancient evil. There are both vampiric and werewolf tendencies, along with some paranormal aspects. It’s a true monster built from various nightmares. The character development in these books is well done and the situations, while familiar, are still made fresh and interesting. There is good reason why Maberry won the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel with this story.

The remaining two books in the trilogy, Dead Man’s Song and Bad Moon Rising, don’t slack off. I have the feeling (and it may be because I read it somewhere) that Maberry actually wrote all of them at once, as if they were one really long work, and then broke them up into three books for publication. This would also seem likely due to the promptness with which they were published, each of them coming out very close to a year after the last. I remember devouring these as they came out and then having to wait until summer for the next one. Fortunately, if you haven’t read Maberry yet, you can grab all three in the trilogy (and maybe even Patient Zero) and devour them at once!

… the world is filled with sirens. There’s always a siren, singing you to a shipwreck.

The last time I went to the library, I did something I haven’t done in a while. I just wandered through the stacks a little and looked, or felt, or whatever it is that happens when I sometimes stumble onto something that I don’t know I’m looking for. This time I struck gold. Caitlin R. Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl (a novel) was shelved at eye level on the end, right next to Two Worlds and In Between Volume 1 (a collection of short stories). I grabbed both after just a short review, and went to lunch, where I immediately became engrossed in Kiernan’s novel within the first few pages.

Kiernan’s character, India Morgan Phelps (Imp to her friends), comes from a family with a history of mental disorders. Her mother was schizophrenic, and both her mother and grandmother committed suicide. Imp also has some psychological issues, and takes a variety of prescriptions (which she discusses as male –“the Messiers”). The book takes the form of a memoir that Imp is writing while trying to work through recent life events that have left a tangle of confusion. Her chance meeting on a moonlit road with a naked woman, Eva Canning, becomes tied up in several obsessions that she deals with — a painting called The Drowning Girl, the fairy tales “Little Red Riding Hood” and “The Little Mermaid”, a disturbing display by artist Charles Perrault, and the mythical sirens. About half way through this book, I had to stop for a day or so. Kiernan definitely hit a nerve with me regarding some of Imp’s obsessions with the number 7 and counting, as well as her fixation on the painting and stories to the point of collecting files of information on them. Everything is a bit too close, too realistic.

Soon, Eva Canning becomes the focal point of Imp’s obsessions, and she believes she has met a true siren, because she absolutely cannot get Eva, or the words Eva whispered to her, out of her mind. But, is Eva a siren or a wolf? In Imp’s mind, she met Eva for the first time twice: once on a warm July evening (wet and close to drowning), and once on a snowy November night (wolflike with golden eyes). Imp has a fully constructed narrative for each meeting, and trying to suss out which of these are true, or whether somehow both are true, takes up much of her mental efforts.

Imp writes what she thinks, and often the other, more sane Imp, breaks in as she tries to struggle through her attempt at figuring out what is really happening to her. Kiernan’s prose is at times simple, eloquent, and exemplary of a true schizoid break as her character thinks deeply about things, and I was especially struck by insights that she voiced, insights that I realized I had also felt but never realized until then. For example, while considering her memories of “Little Red Riding Hood”:

I never pictured the wolf as a real wolf, but as something that walked upright on two legs and looked a lot more like a man than a wolf. So, I suppose I saw it as a werewolf. When I was older, and read a book about wolves and saw a National Geographic documentary, I realized that the way I’d seen a wolf in my mind’s eye made the story truer, because men are much more dangerous than wolves. Especially if you are a wolf, or a little girl.

Her grasp of the horrific is greatest when she allows the most disjointed part of her mind to speak, in a chapter where her version of what has happened and her attempt to get a grip on who — or what — Eva was, is painfully allowed to pour out:

And I can still smell Eva crouched on the raw dirt above me, pissing, shitting wolf lady, and she raises her head, throws back her head, wishing there was a full moon that night, howling anyway. I think, howling because there wasn’t the moon, her faithful brutal sweet rapist. Her rapacious satellite. Her tidal puller. Pray you, love, remember, how could you use a poor maiden so?

Imp’s suffering is what creates the pull of this book. Her inability to determine what is real and what is just a creation of her poor, damaged mind. In the end, our narrator is unreliable, not only for us but for herself, and while there is a facsimile of resolution at the end of the book, neither Imp or the reader is allowed to walk away with it completely tied up in a neat package. There is always a shadow of doubt.

Kiernan’s collection of stories, Two Worlds and In Between, promises to be just as addictive for me. The stories span her career, and she has included short notes after each. However, her introduction to the collection, where she discusses what her stories mean to her, what writing means to her, is some of the most beautiful, dark writing I have ever read:

I wasn’t always a storyteller. I was something else and someone else before, and then there were a number of years as surely amounting to apocalypse as any seven shattered seals or blaring trumpets, a tumult of private war and famine, earthquakes and locusts and poisoned rivers. Becoming a storyteller was a necessary reinvention of myself from the ashes of who I was and who I might have been. In the aftermath, it’s what was left to me, and somehow, somewhy, I decided it was better than lying down and dying. One age ended and the next began, and in the new age I was a storyteller.

I, for one, am very glad that Kiernan’s storytelling age began, and I look forward to all the new paths for stories and nuances of voices that we can expect to hear from her.