364 pages
English language
Published Nov. 6, 2009 by Quercus.
Amazing reboot of the zombie idea. I found the ending a bit odd, as some problems seemed unresolved (or at least not addressed enough), but I really enjoyed it otherwise.
Handling the Undead starts out with a lot of potential. Instead of just having scary zombies chomping on brains, the book opens with the dead rising, but not as monsters. The undead (or reliving, as they're called in the book) are ambulatory vegetables, who occasionally show glimpses of infant-like cognizance. The characters in the novel are forced to deal with the return of their dead loved ones not in the sense of "Holy crap! Grandpa's back and he wants to eat my brains!" but "Hey, Grandpa's back, as a smelly, half-rotted, largely helpless walking corpse. Now what do we do with him?" And when the novel focuses on the emotional drama of the reliving, it is very good, especially the plot about the reporter who digs up his dead grandson to make sure the military doesn't get him first. Unfortunately the book moves away from the emotional drama and into …
Handling the Undead starts out with a lot of potential. Instead of just having scary zombies chomping on brains, the book opens with the dead rising, but not as monsters. The undead (or reliving, as they're called in the book) are ambulatory vegetables, who occasionally show glimpses of infant-like cognizance. The characters in the novel are forced to deal with the return of their dead loved ones not in the sense of "Holy crap! Grandpa's back and he wants to eat my brains!" but "Hey, Grandpa's back, as a smelly, half-rotted, largely helpless walking corpse. Now what do we do with him?" And when the novel focuses on the emotional drama of the reliving, it is very good, especially the plot about the reporter who digs up his dead grandson to make sure the military doesn't get him first. Unfortunately the book moves away from the emotional drama and into kooky psychic nonsense. Turns out the reliving let living people around them read each other's minds, which has dire, if poorly explicated consequences.
This transition to psychic gobbledygook reminds me of Johan Theorin's The Darkest Room, which started out as an excellent psychological/emotional thriller but eventually wandered into the realm of the supernatural, with disappointing results. If Handling the Undead had stayed focused on the characters of Mahler and David (who lost their grandson and wife, respectively) it could have been a fantastic and intelligent addition to the zombie genre. Instead, it adds in subplots about psychic phenomenon, emo cutters, and religious nutjobs preaching the end of days, all of which detract from the strengths of the novel.
