“Give the lady a pop culture reference point.”
Author:
Dana Fredsti
What They Say
In the small university town of Redwood Grove, people are succumbing to a lethal strain of flu. They are dying—but not for long.
Ashley Parker and her boyfriend are attacked by these shambling, rotting creatures that crave human flesh. Their lives will never be the same again. When she awakes Ashley discovers that she is a ‘wild card’—immune to the virus—and is recruited by a shadowy paramilitary organization that offers her the chance to fight back. Fatally attracted to her gorgeous instructor, and bonding with her fellow wild cards, Ashley begins to discover skills she never knew she had.
As the town falls to ever-growing numbers of the infected, Ashley and her team fight to contain the outbreak—but will they be enough?
The Review:
While reading Plague Town I couldn’t help think of Truman Capote’s famous dismissal of Jack Kerouac: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” The goal of any artist is to not be caught producing art. An actor should never be caught acting and a writer should never be caught writing. What this means is that the work you produce should be natural and simple so that you get lost in the art. I never got lost in Plague Town.
Ashley Parker is trying to put her life back together. She just extracted herself from a loveless, controlling marriage to a college professor and has re-entered school to improve her situation. Unfortunately, life has other plans. On a picnic with her boy-toy, Matt, they are attacked by zombies. The hordes of the undead separate them and Ashley is bitten. She awakens in a military hospital and is greeted by her Pandemics in History Professor and her sexy, vegan Teaching Associate, Gabriel. Professor Fraser goes on to tell her that she is a “Wild Card,” a rare person for whom the zombie virus does not turn into a ghoul, but instead grants her increased strength, speed, healing, and senses. Ashley is then recruited into a shadowy paramilitary organization devoted to containing and eradicating those infected with the zombie virus as well as keeping the existence of zombies a secret from the general public. Together with her fellow Wild Cards, Ashley is trained in advanced combat techniques and military tactics and stands as the first line of defense against the undead.
The problem is that the book is far too self-aware and far too in love with pop culture. Fredsti constantly drops pop culture references and it distracts from the plot. To give you an example, here’s a sample from page seven:
“I pulled it [her hair] back and used an industrial strength metal clip made in the shape of a butterfly. The violet and red crystals set in the wings caught the sunlight shining through the bathroom window. At least part of me sparkled. Although not in a Twilight way.
“Personally, I thought Edward was kinda… well… gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I prefer my vamps like Christopher Lee or the cute Billy Idol clone in Buffy. Not bothering with the torturey-angst, just happy to sip blood from some sexy women.”
The majority of the novel is told from Ashley’s point of view, and her mind is a hodge-podge of pop culture references that filters everything she sees and experiences. When she meets Gabriel, the “gorgeous instructor” mentioned in the synopsis, she thinks of him as “an archangel who’d gone a round or two with Rocky Balboa.” The problem is the constant referring to Buffy or Hammer horror movies or the Zombie Survival Guide takes away from the narrative. It just doesn’t feel natural and it adds nothing to the plot while at the same time making the lead character appear vapid and actively disconnected from reality. It would be one thing if this were her coping mechanism for dealing with the revelation that the living dead is real and her sudden position as a Wild Card, but when everything becomes a pop culture in-joke it makes the narrative tedious.
And it doesn’t help matters that the story seems lifted directly from Season Four from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In that season Buffy goes off to college where she meets a handsome Teaching Associate for a Professor that she comes to greatly respect. She later learns that the Professor and the TA are both members of a shadowy paramilitary organization designed to protect the general populace from monsters while at the same time keeping them from knowing that said monsters even exist. Replace monsters with zombies and Slayer with Wild Card and you pretty much have this novel.
The sad thing is that there are sparks of a good story and a strong writer hidden here. While the majority of the story is told from Ashley’s point of view, there are fragments at the end and beginning of some of the chapters told in third person illustrating the spread of the virus and how it’s affecting the town. Those portions are well written and show real human reaction to this horrible situation. There’s no superhero snark, no pop culture in-jokes, just believable characters dealing with extraordinary events. The moments when the narrative is free of Ashley’s voice are genuinely good. I just wish that the rest of the novel had been written that way.
In Summary
Plague Town is not intended to be high literature. It’s designed to be a fun superhero/zombie mashup, the kind of light reading you might take to the beach or when you just want to switch off your mind for a little while. The real question that a reviewer needs to ask of this book is, “Is it fun?” I have to say that it wasn’t for me. I couldn’t connect with the main character, I found the constant pop culture allusions tedious, and the story far too derivative of Season Four of Buffy. There are moments when the writing comes together to make for something fun and interesting, but they are few and far between and occur only when we’re taken out of the narrator’s point of view. If I thought that the rest of the series might move away from Ashley’s POV and be more like those brief moments I might give it a chance, but considering that this is billed as an “Ashley Parker novel” I don’t think that’s too likely to happen.
Content Grade: C
Published By: Titan Books
Release Date: April 3, 2012
MSRP: $7.99
Thanks for taking the time to review my book; I very much appreciate it.�