13 Days of Halloween: Flesh & Bone

by Jonathan Maberry
Simon & Schuster 2012

Benny and his friends continue on their quest to find what's left of civilization before the zombies and death cults get to them first. Third in a (seemingly) endless series.

Why is it so hard for writers, agents, editors and publishers to know when a story has gone on too long and jumped the shark? 

Long-time readers here at the excelsior file might remember how much I loved the first book in this series, Rot & Ruin. In it I thought Maberry had followed the time-honored tradition of using a known genre to explore some aspect of society, to provide a touch of social commentary among the horror. In that particular book I thought he'd touched on an allegory to our own times with zombies acting as a focus of xenophobic fear. There was a sense of "zombies were people, too" that underscored the ignorance of those who would simply choose to fear outsiders and live a life sheltered from the world at large. I thought Rot & Ruin might stand up over time as the beginning of a truly unique series.

The second book, Dust and Decay, was a little more of a hero's journey, the dark passage where Benny would become the merciful zombie silencer all the while working his way through the wilderness on a path toward finding the origins of a jet he once saw, his hope for a rebuilt civilization. In a sort of mash-up of influences there was a bit of a samurai movie that eventually gave way to a Thunderdome-esque ending that threatened to sink the entire story. There was also a hint of a new religion sprouting up from the decay, an apocalyptic death cult that was possibly more organized than Benny and company ever imagined.

Now comes Flesh and Bone, and in the anti-spoiler alert of the year, Benny and his friends don't end up any closer to finding that jet. Perhaps it was something in me that expected the story to come to some conclusion with this third book but it is so clear half way through (and confirmed in the end) that there is a great battle looming in an as-yet-published fourth book that I started feeling bored. How sad, to have felt such great promise in the beginning only to not really care enough by the end of the third book to even want to read the fourth.

I am not against the notion of epic tales, but when I look at a trilogy like Lord of the Rings and see what was accomplished in three books I tend to question whether lengthy series can actually justify their length. I also begin to wonder of the idea of television series, with their seemingly endless storylines, have conditioned readers to amble along until interest drops and then things get hastily wrapped up. Story arcs have multiplied and become so elastic and I don't always think that it serves the best interest of fiction in the end.

So Benny and Nix and Lilah and Chong continue on, with an army of mutated zombies and a war-hungry death cult and  escaped zoo animals all venturing into the wastelands of North America. If any traces of civilization survived that civil world has clearly been outnumbered by the rot and decay to the point where this reader asks "What's the point?"

But if your taste runs towards a small band of heroes facing off against zoms, Flesh and Bone's got your number.

I'm the Best Artist In the Ocean

by Kevin Sherry
Dial 2008

The follow-up to I'm the Biggest Thing in the Ocean turns out to be The Biggest Disappointment of the Year so far.

Giant Squid is back, and being a creature full of ink, he just has to draw. He's pretty goo at drawing all the other fish he sees -- he can draw this, he can draw that -- just as he was boastful of all the fish he used to be bigger than. Leave it to a couple of disgruntled clown fish and a shark to rain on Squid's creative spirit by pointing out that he's making a mess. Then, after a similar thoughtful moment Squid announces that he's making a "Mess-terpiece!" Fold open the the extended spread to reveal that Squid has tagged a whale with oceanic graffiti.

What was great in the previous book was that Squid was a boastful little boy. Like a boy first able to grasp the concepts of language and self, Squid defines himself according to his limited knowledge until he realizes the error of his boast. Then, quite energetically, he embraces that realization and realigns his ego with his environment: he's the biggest thing inside the whale!

But the brag of being the best artist in the ocean doesn't make sense because he's the only artist in the ocean, as far as we can tell. Comparing himself to nothing, the fact of the matter remains in question. Logically one would assume he would find a better artist in nature and then could readjust his claim, but not here. Instead he utters a play on words and leaves us with a very elaborate illustration.

I have to interject here that I went to art school and have more art history in me than I know what to do with. That's me being Squid, but the boast is for a purpose. See, when you read the tiny print at the back of the book you discover that Sherry modeled the endpapers off the work of Miro and the illustration in the whale was influenced by Picasso's Guernica.

The graffiti on the whale is an homage to a cubist's rendition of the horror of the Spanish Civil War? What. The. Hell.

Now, if I hadn't read this note I would have just tripped merrily along, but then I had to go back and look. I don' quite understand how Miro fits into it, but is the Guernica-whale supposed to represent the Squid-artist's depiction of the horror of the oceanic life cycle? I mean, I guess it's cool and all, if you get it (which I didn't on the first pass) but is that really something to casually work into a picture book?

To make a sequel to I'm the Biggest Thing in the Ocean it would have seemed natural to me that Squid have some other illusion of himself exposed, knocked down another peg, or perhaps he could help some other sea life see the error of their ways. Perhaps we could learn something about the oldest thing in the ocean, where we move from old dolphins to old tortoises to crusty Old Mr. Coelacanth.

I guess that's the lesson I never learn. No matter how much I want sequels to favorite books I really should be more careful what I wish for.

A Seed Is Sleepy

by Dianna Hutts Aston
illustrated by Sylvia Long
Chronicle Books 2007

Thankfully, this sequel to An Egg Is Quiet is better than its predecessor.

I know An Egg Is Quiet is a lovely book, a wonderful meditation on the vast variety of ova, factually presented in delicate watercolors. I know because over and over people kept telling me what a wonderful book it was, adults buying it with the rapturous joy of anticipation, excited to share its bountiful nature upon all those lucky children who would receive it.

I saw a lot of grandmothers buy An Egg Is Quiet and not one kid ever picked it up.

No, there's actually nothing wrong with An Egg I Quiet, it didn't float my boat is all. I can appreciate the chef's magnificent presentation of piastra dei testicoli but that doesn't necessarily mean I want to eat it.

Sequels -- in the arts, books, movies and music in particular -- suffer either the fate of "the sophomore slump" where expectations are high but the offering is lacking, or they can offer a renewed hope where the original offered only promise. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, to use a random non-book example.

A Seed Is Sleepy takes us through a garden of seed varieties, showcasing their rainbow of colors and range of sizes, with a smattering of seed trivia to keep things lively. It must be the variety that won me over -- eggs can be so similarly egg-shaped, their markings pastel dull. But here we have red seeds and yellow seeds, seeds thousands of years old from an extinct plant that were discovered and germinated, gigantic seeds that weight more than a house pet and look like large tumors. Look at 'em all! These are some seeds!

Seriously, both of Aston and Long's creations celebrate the aspects of natural birth in ways that are poetic and unique. The watercolors in both speak to a naturalist's love of it's subject and the simplicity in these books yields a wealth of information presented in an uncomplicated fashion. It never feels like they are teaching, never feels scientific, and to that end both books are a triumph.

Having grown up with the Coastal Redwoods of California I'm sure I knew at some point that their seeds were gymnosperms -- or "naked seeds" -- but I don't think I realized that less than 10% of all Redwoods come from seed; the rest, the book informs us, come from other Redwoods, though it doesn't explain how. That's a small peeve of mine, that one example, because it neither explains why the tree produces so many seeds it doesn't need or how it reproduces otherwise. Also, I would have liked a bit of explanation about the types and varieties of seeds that use fires to kick-start their germination. Again, a small thing, but the kind of thing I think I would have dug when I was small.

Eggs, seeds... could fungus be next in this series?