#mira grant

“At long last, all things were going to be dragged out of the darkness of the deeps, and out into the living light of day.”

INTO THE DROWNING DEEP by Mira Grant

[This post contains clearly marked spoilers]

I first read Feed back in the spring of 2010. There had been a subtle buzz about it online for a while; I didn’t know much about other than a) the main character was a woman, b) she was a journalist, and c) there were zombies, and it was the future. 

I don’t always get on well with horror novels. They are often too disgusting, or too bleak, or the central characters are always running and never safe. Zombie novels, I found, tended to be gross and depressing and, if set in the future, presented the world as some kind of post-technology woven-shirts and Jesus dystopia.

Not so with Feed.

Feed is a zombie novel where the zombie apocalypse happened twenty-five years ago and strict security protocols and mandatory blood tests are a day-to-day nuisance that has become background noise. The plot of Feed is not to hide from the zombies in a bunker with a shotgun: the zombies are here to stay. Our protagonist’s primary concern is with providing media coverage of the 2039 presidential campaign trail. Without getting bitten by any zombies along the way.

Georgia (George) and Shaun Mason are a sibling team: George is a Newsie, a hard-hitting journalist, while Shaun is an Irwin, a death-defying thrill seeker. Working side by side, they have created a formidable reputation with a solid fanbase, assisted by the third member of their party: Buffy is a Fictional, a popular writer who hooks the crowds on her serialised stories. Georgia, Shaun, and Buffy are selected to be the first blogger team to ever join a presidential campaign trail, and are the first generation never to have experienced life before the zombies rose. But as they follow Senator Ryman along his campaign trail, accidents keep happening and people start dying, and their determination to report the truth spawns sinister consequences.

Above all, Feed is a political thriller. The world is presented to us through the perspective of George and her conviction to report the truth at all costs. She is comfortable in the new world she inhabits: she is used to showering with bleach, taking constant blood tests, carrying a gun, and watching everyone she meets for the signs that the virus they carry within them has activated and that they are slowly converting into a zombie. This is really what made the novel for me: the depth and thoughtfulness of the world building. How would public places work now that people are terrified of being trapped in large crowds? How does the Kellis-Amberlee virus that creates zombies work, and how can it be monitored? When people prefer to stay in rather than go out, how do entertainment and the media work? What kind of relationships do people create for themselves when physically spending time with people is a thing of the past?

George and Shaun have grown up with only each other for company. Their parents are superstar reporters who adopted them as part of a publicity stunt, leaving them largely to their own devices unless there is a photo opportunity to be had. Their co-dependency is so great that they enter one-person airlocks and take their blood tests simultaneously, unwilling to be parted from each other even if one of them tests as infected and they both get incinerated.
She is also constantly managing her disability: George has retinal Kellis-Amberlee, a reservoir condition of the zombie virus that makes her eyes incredibly vulnerable to UV light and incapable of tears, and she is constantly forced to announce her disability to circumvent the usual tests for zombie conversion that could leave her permanently blind or riddled with bullets due to a false-positive result. She deals with blinding headaches and always wears sunglasses, and when things get too much to deal with must wear light-blocking contact lenses that reduce her sight enough that she is no longer legally allowed to carry a gun.

George is the driving force of the novel, refusing to back down even as the stakes get higher. In this new world, why should fear of death stop her pursuing the truth? Shaun follows at her right hand, backing up every decision she makes and bringing levity to her seriousness. 

[SPOILERS BELOW]

So when George gets hit by a dart loaded with the virus and is facing zombie conversion, it only makes sense for her and Shaun to lock themselves inside their armoured van until everything is over.

I have rarely encountered an author willing to kill off their first-person protagonist, especially in the first book of a trilogy. This is what made the stakes real for me: even our protagonist can’t live forever. George, slowly converting into a zombie, sits down and writes her last report while Shaun stands behind her with a gun to her head. When she is too far gone to continue, Shaun blows her brains out and waits in the corner of their van to see if by granting her mercy, he has doomed himself.

Shaun survives and from then on becomes our new protagonist: the novel continues on in his voice as he tries to finish George’s work and cope with what he has done. But George isn’t gone for long, as the siblings have become so co-dependent that Shaun starts to hear her voice in his head giving him advice and encouragement.

Very few novels have affected me so profoundly as Feed. Staging a political thriller in the world that is left after a zombie apocalypse, choosing to follow a journalist in a world that has become hostile and secretive, and making that journalist an ambitious and uncompromising woman? Feed is the novel that other zombie novels can only dream of being.

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