It's the Bank Holiday Weekend over here which means that (if the car is working...) I'm going to be driving hither and yon doing all the nice things that work gets in the way of. If the car isn't working then nappy changing is still very much on the agenda these days...
Either way, I don't have a lot of time for blogging this weekend so... the Bank Holiday competitions were born! :o)
To be fair, the only real difference to the competitions I run normally is that these are happening on a Bank Holiday weekend but... free books, right? ;o)
First up is Mira Grant's 'Feed', a rather handy looking zombie novel that I'm probably reading while you're reading this. Here's the blurb...
The year was 2014. We had cured cancer. We had beaten the common cold. But in doing so we created something new, something terrible that no one could stop. The infection spread, virus blocks taking over bodies and minds with one, unstoppable command: FEED. Now, twenty years after the Rising, bloggers Georgia and Shaun Mason are on the trail of the biggest story of their lives - the dark conspiracy behind the infected. The truth will get out, even if it kills them.
Sounds good doesn't it? Well, thanks to Orbit I have three copies to give away to three lucky readers of the blog. The thing is though, only UK readers can enter...
If you're still reading then what you need to do is drop me an email (address at the top right hand side of the screen) telling me who you are and what your postal address is. Make it clear in the subject header that this is the competition you are entering!
I'll let this one run until the 6th of June and will aim to announce the winners as soon as possible afterwards.
Good Luck!
Aww, that one does look good, and I haven't read any horror in a while. Methinks I will direct Raine to come enter your contest - if, uh, she isn't too busy with the bank holiday.
ReplyDeleteDidn't particularly like this one. The setting was poorly thought out politically, and needed another edit to cut the more clumsy prose. And then there's the plot.
ReplyDeleteUltimately things are revealed to be happening because a politically ambitious state governor wants to unleash zombies selectively to kill off political rivals and gain his way to the presidency, there to take America to "traditional" theocratic-fascist values. Three problems here. One, he’s far too stupid a figure to be really credible in this position, having an arbitrary and poorly developed plan. For all that he’s declared to be calculating and a dangerous adversary he fails in pretty much every discrete action he tries to do in the novel, and largely succeeds in tipping his hand enormously. Second, his underlying reasons for doing this are entirely vague, and rather contradictory. At best he’s an enormous hypocrite that doesn’t seem to have noticed he’s undermining the things he claims to want to protect, at worst he’s a completely psychopath that inconsistently does whatever the plot requires. Related to these issues is that he’s not even a unique or notable poor villain, but a stock caricature that’s used extremely often in thrillers of this type. Third, he’s all too readily identifiable as evil. From the moment he’s introduced as a political challenger the outline of his views make it clear he’s immoral and unworkable, and there’s never anything given that indicates enough of an appeal to attract political support. The later plot depends on Tate’s ability to have convinced another blogger to help him, but it’s left incredibly general what points of ideology are at work here. It’s even worse after we meet him, as the interview scene and every subsequent action just ooze menace and deception. Given that, when the characters figure out that some well connected figure is trying to kill people by proxy it’s immediately obvious that Tate is the only possible candidate, and the obviousness of this and the subsequent shenanigans drags down the last third of the book enormously.
As a result, the plot is effectively unbelievable and of fairly arbitrary meaning. There’s an attempt at a big message with the end in showing the free bloggers as against the evil power-hungry political forces that want to keep people afraid and thus controlled. However Feed shares issues with Cory Doctrow’s Little Brother in this whole regard. For one thing, having the antagonist political figure be so relentlessly, over the top evil destroys the chance for a real political statement, instead it allows the grinding down of strawman by having the fanatic figure be completely without morals and without any ability for long-term planning. Similarly, by making the well connected political figure so stupid that he’s defeated by several bloggers it undermines the real stakes involved here and delivers a petty wish-fulfillment political story in a bait and switch of a dystopia. Very much like the teenager bringing down the Department of Homeland Security in Little Brother. Overall it’s less egregious here than Doctrow’s writing, because it’s not as prominent, but insofar as the political elements fold into the plot it’s a pretty thorough failure, producing a situation at once hard to believe and not at all out of the ordinary. General Tate is the sort of power-hungry politico who regrets he has but one mustache to twirl for the sake of his country.
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