Nostrum and Emaculum

Wrapping up my Kindle Unlimited experiment, I conclude Roberto Calas' Scourge trilogy with Nostrum and Emaculum, in text rather than audiobook format.

Nostrum picks up two days after the end of The Scourge, as Sir Edward Dallingridge decides that faith and prayer and patience aren't working to heal his plagued wife and sets off in search of the alchemist who is rumoured to have found a cure. Reunited with Tristan and joined by the sassy nun Beliscensia, he seeks out the island fortress where the alchemist works, hunts a dragon, is captured several times and continues to be menaced by his nemesis Sir Gerald and to experience greatly varied success in the employment of hand cannons.

Emaculum sees Sir Edward, cure in hand, struggling to return to St Edmund's Bury through the increasingly splintered jurisdictions of the many mad kings of the new England (one of whom is the actual mad king of England.) With the cure in hand he has a chance to save Elizabeth, but the Virgin Mary and St Giles have trials yet in store for their apparent favourite, now sworn to be the champion of the plagued, defender of those who can yet be cured of their malady.

As in The Scourge, Calas merges his zombie horror with a loving recreation of the approximate history of the period as it might have played out given the rise of a zombie plague in the wake of the Black Death. He keeps the source of the plague (god, the devil, ground up saints' bones) uncertain, and likewise the means of repelling them (holy relics, lichens and lepers) are never explored in anachronistic terms. The focus is on Sir Edward and his increasingly obsessive quest to save his wife or to die with her.

Sir Edward is brutal and Sir Tristan, his closest ally, seems almost inordinately pleased each time he manages to spike an enemy with the plague tincture. On the other hand it was a violent age, and their enemies are almost monstrous, which kind of makes them seem okay by comparison.

The Scourge trilogy is a decent historical zombie romp. It's more or less my first - at least in written form - although I'm sure the kindle store is full of the bloody things by now. It is thus my benchmark for the subgenre moving forward.

The Scourge

In the wake of the Black Death and the Peasant's Revolt, 14th Century England falls under a new shadow. The Scourge is a pestilence that transforms its victims into shambling revenants, hungry for flesh and highly contagious. Sir Edward of Bodiam sets out across the plague-infested land with two companions, the impious Sir Tristan and the devout Sir Morgan, in defiance of the bishops and in search of his wife, stranded in St Edmund's Bury.

The Scourge is a mediaeval zombie road movie, a bit like Mad Max on horses, as Sir Edward and his party make their way north, encountering rogues, profiteers and the petty fiefdoms or renegade lords along the way. It is by turns darkly humourous and desperately tragic (Sir Morgan's attempt to save a village with the guaranteed blood of the Virgin Mary is heartrending in its irony,) and Calas makes excellent use of repetition (as Narrator, Sir Edward harks back to certain phrases: the moment of realisation, in times of madness only madness can save) in what was originally a serial novel released through Amazon in installments.

The audiobook narration is a little unsteady in places, but thanks to Kindle Unlimited I didn't pay for it and it is mostly well done.

Calas obviously has some fun with his history as he weaves a zombie apocalypse into the general bleakness and horror of 14th Century life. It's a little short on decent female characters (most are in need of rescue and, as seen through Edward's eyes, idealised figures of virtue, and the one that isn't is a veritable monster,) but is otherwise an engaging adventure yarn.

World War Z

I deliberately chose a cover without
Brad Pitt on it.

World War Z is subtitled 'An oral history of the zombie wars', and it does exactly what it says on the tin. In a series of semi-overlapping narratives, it describes the rise of the zombie plague, a pathogen originating in China and spread by ambulatory corpses and infected refugees (and via the illegal trade in rapidly harvested organs) through the first hand accounts of more than forty characters interviewed by a UN investigator after the end of the Zombie War.

The book uses its multiple viewpoints to explore the war from as many angles as possible: civilians, survivalists, military personnel of several nations and politicians of varying persuasions. Its focus is American - justified both by the nationality of the investigator and the narratives of other post-war nations, in particular the 'Holy Russian Empire', an expansionist theocratic state - but its scope is global, with the account of the commander of the ISS throughout the crisis one of the most powerful.

By its nature, World War Z is prime material for an audiobook adaptation, and it has had several. The one attached to my kindle edition is pretty damned good, although I am now greatly tempted by the super-plus all-star version with this cast.

I'm incredulous that in adapting this book for the screen anyone didn't think that the best idea was just to cherry pick a couple of these stories and film it as a mockumentary, spliced with 'archive footage' from the zombie wars. How did they not do that? Instead we got a crappy action movie which tried to jam poor Brad Pitt back into the action hunk mould that kept him from achieving his true potential as a talented character actor for so long.

World War Z is a satirical novel, using the zombie war as a lens to examine the nature of human reaction to disaster, both singly and corporately. It takes an unusually even-handed approach, with American isolationism and capitalism taking as many knocks as Soviet collectivism, and paints a vivid picture of a world at and after a war for which it was utterly unprepared. It tells tales of heroism and folly, of great heart and towering cynicism. Governmental incompetence, corporate malfeasance and models of morale are all covered, from the brutal tactics of the Russian leadership to largely uninfected Cuba's switch from faltering Communist casualty to the great boom economy of the war.

It's not a perfect book, and certainly there were a couple of points in the English section where I felt that Brooks had gone awry a little, but it's a satire more than a political assessment and some inaccuracy can be allowed. I can't speak for the effectiveness of the Russian and Chinese sections in particular, but it certainly lacks the triumphal pro-Americanism of, say, the movie. In particular the segregation of 'Unified Palestine' by the Israeli and Palestinian authorities is plagued by violent resistance from both Jewish and Muslim extremists, but isn't overrun with the living dead as soon as an American points out that they're fucked.