‘The Forest of Hands & Teeth’ – Carrie Ryan (Gollancz)

In the same way that a zombie will relentlessly shamble onwards, in its search for fresh meat, I’m always looking for my next fix of zombie fiction. The only difference is that I don’t shamble, well... not all the time...
I’ve heard a lot of good things about ‘The Forest of Hands & Teeth’ (Carrie Ryan’s debut novel) and the fact that it has zombies in it sealed the deal in terms of my wanting to read it. I was lucky enough to have a review copy come through the door (Gollancz are publishing this in July) and it wasn’t long before I found myself picking it up for a read.
I finished the book last night and the first thing I did was to take a deep breath. Yes, ‘The Forest of Hands & Teeth’ turned out to be one of those books that made me forget to breathe on more than one occasion...

Mary has spent her whole life behind the fences of the village (in the middle of the forest), living under the laws of the Sisterhood and looking on as the Guardians wage an unceasing war against the Unconsecrated (zombies to the likes of you and me) who are constantly trying to break through. Things are about to change though... Not only will Mary find out things, about the Sisterhood, that she didn’t want to know but a breach in the fence will force her to contemplate life outside the village. Whether it’s with the man she loves, or the man who loves her, remains to be seen...

The best zombie books, that I’ve read, are the ones that either go for the ‘full on zombie apocalypse’ (millions of zombies with a liberal dose of gore) or decide to make the zombies almost incidental to the plot and concentrate instead on how characters adapt to life in a world that has completely changed. Ryan decides to make the second option the focus for ‘Forest’ and this pays off beautifully with a story that kept me reading the whole way through. (If you saw someone walking around the London Underground with his head buried in a book, it was me...)

The spin that ‘Forest’ uses is that it has been a number of years since the initial zombie uprising (we never find out exactly how long) and the people living in the village have been there so long, generations, that they no longer know what’s on the outside. What you get, as a result, is a very claustrophobic atmosphere that is emphasised both by the confining fence and Mary’s insatiable curiosity about what lies beyond the forest. Some people are not meant to live behind a fence and Mary is definitely one of these people. While her actions do not lead to the eventual breach, the breach is symbolic of the pent up tension that has nowhere else to go but outwards.

Just when you thought the novel had nowhere else to go everything is thrown on its head and the ending is thrown up in the air. This is when you really get to see what the main players are made of. The flip side is that several questions, that we are led to believe will be answered, are forgotten as the plot turns in a completely new direction. I guess that’s sometimes the way things go in real life but it did leave me wondering why these questions had been pushed to the fore to begin with. ‘The Forest of Hands & Teeth’ feels like it could be the first book in a series and maybe this is where the answers will be found...

The survivors of the village all react in different ways to their new situation and we also get to see how they cope with the sort of situations that anyone familiar with zombie films will know all about. Things get very intense here. What do you do with a zombie baby? How do you cope with the knowledge that a loved one has been bitten and will turn? I already knew the answers but the real fun here is watching the characters arrive there themselves, even at the risk of fracturing the group...
All the while this is happening there is a love story playing out that Ryan does well to balance with the bleaker elements of the plot. Can love survive in the middle of a zombie uprising? It can but not in the way you would expect, the need to survive and make your own way will always take over...

The zombies may not take centre stage but Ryan still uses them to good affect in scenes that had me jumping as I was so engrossed in the book that I didn’t notice people walking up behind me! There’s an ongoing debate over the relative merits of ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ zombies, Ryan chooses to use both sort and this has the knock on effect of upping the tempo of the plot just when it matters. However, the reader is again left with questions to which no answers are given. Maybe we will see Mary return in a sequel after all...

Despite the unanswered questions that it raises, ‘The Forest of Hands & Teeth’ remains a more than solid debut from an author that I’ll be keeping an eye open for in the future. I reckon it would make a good film as well...

Eight and Three Quarters out of Ten