I almost gave up on Brian Keene’s DEAD SEA, intending to cite the BOOKGASM 100-page rule, to whit: If a book hasn’t engaged and/or maintained your interest by page 100, fugetaboutit. Having read and enjoyed the author’s first two zombie novels – THE RISING and CITY OF THE DEAD – I grabbed this one up with Keene anticipation.
First sentence, bingo: “I didn’t shoot the bitch until she started eating Alan’s face.”
What promise! I mean, what more do you want in a thriller than a bitchy woman, violence, food, friendship and the pleasurable anxiety that accompanies delayed gratification?
The “I” in that quoted sentence is Lamar Reed, who considers himself a two-time loser because he is gay and he is black. He also lives in Baltimore, so maybe he should be thinking in terms of three-time rather than two.
As DEAD SEA – not to be confused with Tim Curran’s current DEAD SEA – begins, the zombie plague has already reached the point at which humanity is pretty much given up for lost. These zombies are quick and insatiable, grotesque and just generally bad-tempered. They pretty much make the zombies in a Lucio Fulci movie look like the models in last year’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.
While escaping a roving band of these monsters, Lamar finds refuge in a house occupied by two kids, siblings Malik and Tasha. The three bond into a makeshift family and when the house becomes too dangerous to hold them, they decide to make their way to the docks. They pick up another wanderer along the way, and it’s during this stage of their journey that the book began to lose me. Not because it isn’t colorfully written – this kind of description is fun, in its own way:
“A naked dead man stepped out of the alley and passed through my yard. He was covered with dirt and blood, and his skin was a dark bluish-purple, the color of a bruise. There was something else wrong with him, too, but I couldn’t tell what it was until he turned toward my house again. Then I saw what was wrong. His genitals were missing—replaced by a big, bloody hole … And now here he was, dickless and dead.”
That’s actually one of the tamer descriptions of the Z-team. Every nasty thing Keene can conjure up in his mind gets dumped into the pot. But this kind of thing in print has the same problem it does on screen: It just isn’t frightening and, as black humor, it isn’t amusing, either.
A bigger problem for me, however, is the fact that the book wastes no time in following into a pattern: Run away, meet a new character, zombies attack, someone dies and has to be shot in the head to prevent his/her return, escape narrowly, run away, meet a new character, etc. That’s why I put the book down.
Plus, there is an inexplicably lengthy passage during which Joseph Campbell’s theory of the monomyth is explained ad nauseum. This mini-grad course in world mythology goes on and on. What the hell?
But why did I keep returning? Because Keene is a better writer than I’m making him sound like he is and I was curious to find out if he was going to pull some kind of miracle ending out of thin air to save the world. And I became interested in how he was handling the ecological message that when the oceans become useless to human life, we can all kiss our butts farewell.
So do I actually recommend DEAD SEA? I wish you hadn’t asked me that. Let’s just say that you should read Keene’s first two zombie novels and if you like them, read this one. If you’ve grown tired of zombies by the conclusion of CITY OF THE DEAD, it’s time to stop, because this is the weakest of the trio.
Keene has done much better than this, and he will again. –Doug Bentin
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• THE CONQUEROR WORMS by Brian Keene
• TERMINAL by Brian Keene
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
I may be among the minority who was underwhelmed by his zombie debut The Rising. I could see what Keene was trying to do, but I think zombies are a purely visual horror, and don’t translate that well to the page.
Corey, I think that’s a very good observation. I think a lot of contemporary horror writers are actually writing movies instead of novels. The more literary writers, like Ramsey Campbell, are highly respected but they’re not being read by many of the guts and gore fans.
I liked DEAD SEA a lot more than RISING – of course I loathed RISING.
I liked The Rising and City of the Dead for different reasons – very cinematic in their scope, like movie popcorn. I liked Dead Sea because it was just plain dark, unflinching and more real of a story if zombies did indeed take over the earth, sea and sky; like the popcorn found under the movie theatre seat.
Dead Sea was definitely the weakest BK novel I’ve ever read. The Joseph Campbell thing was ridiculous and told the reader considerably less about Campbell than would any half-assed discussion about George Lucas. Plus through the whole novel the characters are discussing their fear that the infection is going to jump species. When it inevitably happens, Keene hits you over the head with screamingly obvious “clues” that the characters don’t get it until they’re being chewed on.
Keene’s never been a real disciplined or careful writer and he always seems to throw in everything AND the kitchen sink but he has a vitality that’s really enjoyable. My favorite of his books is the Conqueror Worm. I love the section set in da rowned Manhatten skyskraper, populated Satanists and surrounded by mermaids/sirens and Cthulhu.
Agreed that Zombies are a hard sell on the printed page. I’ve read short stories that get it right and have some atmosphere (Andy Duncan’s “Zora and the Zombie”; Dale Bailey’s “Death and Suffrage”) but never a novel.
I have this one but haven’t read it yet. He’s a great writer.
The very first page sums up everything I like about Brian Keene (“I didn’t shoot the bitch until she started eating Alan’s face”) and everything that sometimes makes me want to throw his books across the room (“Cue ‘Hey Joe’ by Jimi Hendrix”).
I’ve yet to a read a better zombie book than World War Z by Max Brooks
Sounds like a great book, I’m going to get it.