Steampunk? Check. Zombies? Check. Movie potential? Huge. Novel quality? Eh.
Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker reminded me of Paolo B’s The Windup Girl because both have the same strengths and weaknesses. On the plus side, they both feature vividly imaginative worlds with bizarre and richly explored scifi/fantasy elements, and both feature a variety of interesting characters. But neither one really has a plot, and on this particular weakness, Boneshaker is clearly the weaker of the two.
Spoilers in the full review!
If you were to ask me, in passing, in an elevator, to tell you what Boneshaker was about, I would stare into space for a moment, and then stammer, “It’s sort of about zombies in the Wild West, I guess.”
If you were to ask me that question in a more literary setting, the answer would be, “A son goes looking for the truth about his allegedly evil father, and 300 pages of zombie-gore later, his mother tells him that yes, his father was evil.”
It may look as though I’m over-simplifying for the sake a cheap laugh, but I’m not. Boneshaker is so riddled with unnecessary coincidences and conveniences that the characters become totally irrelevant. This isn’t a novel so much as an action/horror movie in paper form.
The back story: Leviticus Blue used a giant mining machine to destroy downtown Seattle, releasing toxic fumes from the ground that turn people into zombies (and allegedly robbing all of the downtown banks while he was there). To contain the plague, the locals built a giant wall around the center of the city, which we will call “Zombietown” in this review, or “Z-town” for my New Jersey readers.
Sixteen years later, Blue’s son Zeke wants to know whether his dad was really a bad man, and since his mother Briar doesn’t want to talk about it, he sneaks into Z-town looking for clues. Mother Briar promptly goes after him because, well, he’s probably going to be eaten by zombies.
Zeke slips under the walls and immediately meets a man who takes him on a tour of the Z-town underground and teaches him some zombie survival skills. An earthquake conveniently closes the tunnel that Zeke used, so his mother must go find the really cool airships to take her over the wall. Once inside, she too immediately meets a man who takes her on a tour of the Z-town underground and teaches her zombie survival skills.
Mother and son wander around the city for two days, fighting zombies and trying to find things. The mysterious Dr Minnericht unleashes some zombies on Briar’s new friends, for no reason at all. Just because he’s mean, I suppose. Then Zeke’s ride out of the city crashes and he’s conveniently captured by Minnericht’s agent, who apparently has nothing better to do than stand around waiting for airships to crash right in front of him.
Briar’s new friend Lucy needs to visit Minnericht, providing a convenient excuse for Briar to meet him, too. Some people think this masked doctor might be the evil Leviticus Blue! But one big zombie battle later, Minnericht is killed, and mother and son are reunited. They then take a leisurely stroll to Briar’s old house where she tells her son that yes, his father was a bank robber, and SPOILER ALERT it was Briar who killed him, sixteen years ago.
And then they take the stolen money and fly off to start a new life, somewhere. I guess.
The problem, obviously, is that the book could have been about anyone at all who happened to wander through Z-town, met the locals, and fought some zombies.
Alternately, a story about Briar and Zeke should have ended in Chapter One with the following dialogue:
ZEKE: Mom, I want to know what really happened to Dad.
BRIAR: You want the truth? He was a mean husband and a bank robber, and I shot him.
ZEKE: Oh, I see. I’m glad we had this talk.
End scene.
I’m a little grumpy that the zombies are just dangerous creatures. They could have been replaced with packs of rabid dogs, or giant man-eating bats, or just really hungry homeless people. The classic wolfman, vampire, and frankenstein monster are symbols of human fears and weaknesses. The classic zombie is supposed to be a symbol of mindless conformity, but it isn’t used as anything but a creature in Boneshaker, which is a bit drab.
Bottom Line: If you want a steampunky adventure with plenty of airships, gadgets, and zombie-horror, this is your ride. It’s sort of pointless, but it is fun.
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