Fangs for the Fantasy

Alice was a normal girl in a normal world, without a concern beyond looking after her little sister and the heavy summer heat

And then the infected appeared. Ravenous zombies determined to eat everything in their path until nothing was left alive. In the first wave destroyed so much and left her with no-one to trust, no-one to rely on

Only herself, her anger and her will to survive.

I can see what this book is trying to do. I can see it trying to mash up Lewis Carol’s Alice with a gritty zombie apocalypse. I can see the attempt to meld the whacky and surreal with the dark and awful. Whimsical meets horrifying. Quixotic meets macabre. Outlandish absurdity meets cruel reality.

It was going to take the characters and concepts of Alice Through the Looking Glass, even lift entire chunks of Carrol’s dialogue and twist it into a desperate, gritty, horrifying fight for survival against the undead horde with lots of gore and loss

That’s a pretty tall order for any book.

And in places this book almost approaches it. I was amused by Catherine Pillar and her zombie killing magic mushrooms. Hare and Hatter weren’t too bad.

But that, sadly, is the limit of what it does manage it. Everything else – the Duchess, the Red Queen, the Cheshire cat (ye gods that was poor – a guy who grinned called “Chez” wasn’t enough, you have to actually have someone say he grinned like a Cheshire Cat? What’s the point of a melding/homage if you directly reference the source material like that?) was terribly convoluted or jarring. It didn’t work, it didn’t work at all.

It wasn’t silly enough, surreal enough or funny enough for the Lewis Carrol elements to work. The imported dialogue was clunky, grossly out of place and felt less like a homage and more like the author had hit their head – or the characters had. The references where either twisted sufficiently into the setting as to make them little more than a name or a reference (like the Mock Turtle or Gryphon) or so grossly out of place as to just break the whole scene – like the Queen of Hearts and her headchoppy silliness. This could work if it were more silly, if it were more absurd and ridiculous and laughable. It could have worked – but it wasn’t. The story wasn’t surreal enough to be intentionally ridiculous – it ended up just being plain ridiculous.

The same goes for the grittiness. We have the gore and the grief and the desperate battle for survival. We even have Alice who could be an interesting character – losing a beloved family member very early in the zombie apocalypse she is consumed by grief, guilt and hatred for the one she deems responsible for the death. She then goes through a series of traumatic disasters, sees groups form and die very quickly on the very first day. It’s actually quite realistic how it would happen – as she is a desperate fleeing survivor multiple times as various people try to come together only to be destroyed over and over again.

Read More