Dead, But Not Brain Dead

Dead, But Not Brain Dead

05/15/2007

Monster Nation is the first in David Wellington’s zombie trilogy, and I came to it after stumbling across Wellington’s second installment, Monster Island, last year in my public library. The third in the series, Monster Planet, is projected to be published later this year. Each book stands alone, though there are a few common characters, and my enjoyment for the first book was not diminished by reading the middle part beforehand.

The plot of Monster Nation is similar to Monster Island—an unknown malady has swept the United States, reanimating the dead according to “Romero Rules,” creating zombies of the mindless, shambling variety with an insatiable desire to consume human flesh. As various cities fall to the walking dead, state and local authorities are overwhelmed, and civilization quickly collapses, leaving behind the few living to wander helplessly through what puts me in mind of a post-Katrina landscape. FEMA is in the background, helpfully sitting on its collective hands, and the military is also of no use, not because half of it is deployed to Iraq, but because you can’t really kill something that’s already dead, at least not easily, certainly not in the early days of the plague anyway, when incredulous scientists do not wish to admit that the dead are reanimating due to a supernatural force they cannot explain. Monster Island broadens the scope of the series—months later, the whole world is infected, and only small pockets of humans are left alive.

While Wellington’s conception of the zombie owes a good deal to George Romero’s representation of the creature, the Monster series is interesting nevertheless because ultimately his zombies transcend Romero’s Rules. With George Romero’s fourth installment in his Dead series, Land of the Dead, we still do not learn what caused the newly dead to walk. Instead, it is implied that becoming a zombie is perhaps some sort of spiritual sickness brought about by our consumerist society. Wellington preserves Romero’s scope of the zombie plague while giving an explanation for it—not a terribly good explanation, in my opinion, but an explanation nevertheless (and one I will not share with you for fear of ruining your enjoyment should you choose to read the novel). But what really makes Wellington’s Monster series interesting is that a handful of his zombies are smart.

In Land of the Dead,, we have Big Daddy, a creature I call zombie sapiens, who is capable of using tools and of encouraging class consciousness in his fellow zombies, ultimately enabling them to overthrow the evil Kaufman in his luxury compound. Wellington’s zombies are a step above Big Daddy, who lacks language though not empathy. In Monster Island we have Gary, a physician in life who understands that the walking dead are stupid because anoxia has irreparably damaged their brains before they are revived. Realizing that it is only a matter of time before he too succumbs, Gary steals a ventilator from the hospital where he works, hooks himself up to it in his apartment, then commits suicide in a tub of ice. When he returns to “life,” Gary is himself but undead, retaining all of the intelligence he had before his death because his brain was never deprived of oxygen. Gary ultimately uses this intelligence to form a plan far more evil than that of Mael, the Druid priest sacrificed over a millennia ago, his body preserved in a peat bog until the present time, when he has been reanimated. Mael is a true believer in that old time religion. As a child of Teuagh, the Father of the Clans, he serves his dark god, who has been angered by human actions on earth and so wishes to make a clean slate. The sentient zombie Mael sees himself as the divine putter outer of the lights on planet earth in order to end all suffering and appease Teuagh. Gary, however, has a far less spiritual view of his new mission in life, which is to turn the existing humans into cattle to feed on eternally.

In Monster Nation, Nilla is a similarly sentient zombie. However, unlike Gary, she has pity for all of humanity, and when Mael comes to her so that she can be one of his divine instruments, she has no desire to exact this retribution. Indeed, Nilla’s struggle against Mael is her own struggle to regain the humanity she has lost after rising from her own death. Nilla’s name is born of her first conscious experience as a zombie. She awakens in an oxygen bar, where unknown to her at present, she had taken refuge after being bit by a zombie. When Nilla dies in this environment, her brain does not suffer from anoxia to the same degree that the other zombies are affected, and so when the police later find her wandering, she has enough social skills to pass as human. The police insist on taking Nilla to the hospital, since it seems obvious to them that she is suffering from shock, and she takes her name from the snack cookies they offer her in the car, a box of Nilla wafers. And Nilla is indeed the perfect name for the heroine of Wellington’s first in this series, since she is “vanilla” in that she is a blank slate, learning about zombies along with the reader. Throughout the novel, Mael tries to convince Nilla to work with him with the promise that when they are finished, he will tell Nilla what her name was in life. And when Nilla finally gets this name, she is more than a mindless drone shuffling through the landscape, trying to avoid killing humans except in self defense—she is an individual.

While I like this facet of the plot, and the fairly cinematic scope of the problem that Wellington gives us, at times Monster Nation was too much action-adventure for my tastes, far more than his later novel, Monster Island. Yet Wellington does manage to convey the sense of utter desperation that only a natural disaster of this scale can provoke, and his Monster series made a significant contribution to the slim but ever increasing body of zombie literature (as opposed to film and comics, still the two primary mediums of the zombie tale until the late 20th and early 21st century).