M R Carey, The Girl With All The Gifts (2014)

On the upside, this is a sharply written, well-plotted, grippy-read-y thriller. It builds a workable post-apocalyptic world, keeps its momentum going and pays off nicely. The central character, the titular young girl, little Melanie, is an especially noteworthy creation: a highly intelligent child kept in a cell, who is strapped into a chair and muzzled in order to be wheeled through to her schoolroom with her peers. Why is she treated this way? Ah, that's the hook. Her perspective on the classroom experience (something there's not enough of in contemporary culture: it's a shame it only occupies the early sections, here), on adult attitudes to childhood, and on the arbitrary and often cruel way she and her kind are treated, all this is brilliantly done.

On the downside, it's yet another zombie story.

To return to the upside, the rationale for zombification (a toxoplasma gondii-like neural fungus) is kind-of new, and people never use the 'z'-word, because, you know: the one thing you don't want to do when zombie apocalypse has destroyed almost all humanity is to trip-yourself into using worn-out terminology like a square. So it's 'hungries', not zombies. There's a creditable primary focus on female characters and female interactions here, that doesn't exclude or merely demonise the men in the story; and there's nicely-handled light dusting of mythic resonance: Pandora's box, Iphigenia at Aulis.

On the downside, though: it's yet another zombie story.

I don't want to underplay the upside. This is a smart, readable book. It plays cleverly with our point-of-view assumptions when it comes to this mode of story; it has some interesting things about humanisation and dehumanisation, about parents and children. True, the middle section was a bit wandering-about-y, and I kept getting flashes of Cronin's The Passage, which though it also has its problems is a heftier, richer version of the same thing. Still, this isn't aiming at epic sweep; it's trying for something more emotionally engaging.

On the downside, though: it's yet one more example of that egregiously over-supplied contemporary sub-genre known as 'the zombie story'.

So upside: readable, engaging.

Downside: another another another fucking zombie story.

That's the thing about zombie stories. It never BRRAAAAAINS but it pours.