Monster Island
by David Wellington
(Thunder's Mouth Press, $13.95, 272 pages; trade paperback, published
April 2006.)
 The
past few years have seen a sharp rise in the popularity of zombies,
with the release and success of numerous anthologies, movies, comics,
and role-playing games. David Wellington adds something truly original
to the lore with Monster Island, the first volume of his zombie
trilogy.
Monster Island is a delightfully inventive and fast-paced hybrid
of several genres: horror, science fiction, postcolonial fiction, pulp
adventure yarn, and disaster thriller. An as yet unexplained cataclysm
has released a plague of mindless zombies all over the world; now, unless
their corpses are destroyed, the dead rise, with an insatiable hunger
for live human meat.
Worldwide, governments and civil order have collapsed. Amidst the
international chaos, an African warlord kidnaps the daughter of a former
UN worker and forces him to travel to UN headquarters in New York with
a team of young female soldiers. Their mission: find AIDS medication.
But the city is densely overrun with zombies.
Meanwhile, a New York man, seeing his fate as inevitable, engineers
a method of turning into a zombie without becoming mindless.
The two stories intersect, as more (but not all) secrets behind the
zombie plague are unveiled and more mysteries come to the forefront.
Wellington spins a gripping yarn, deftly plays with genre expectations,
and creates numerous visually powerfully scenes. He also manages to
write a novel that is both satisfyingly self-contained and intriguing
enough to make at least this reader eager to continue the series.
Originally published, in slightly different form,
The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 22 July 2006.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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