Read This: Feed

What would it take for the blogosphere to replace the mainstream media as the average person most trusted news source? Mira Grant’s Feed has a simple answer to that question: The end of the world as we know it. Basically, the cures for cancer and the common cold come with an unintended side effect—an honest-to-God zombie uprising, which old media shrugs off as impossible, leaving frontline bloggers to inform the world about what’s really going on. Flash-forward twenty years, and bloggers across the country are forming loose network alliances and competing for ratings, and one trio, led by a young newshound named Georgia Mason, has been invited to tag along on a presidential campaign.

So Feed is a cross-country tour through a post-apocalyptic America with certain contemporary digital trends blown up to satirical proportions, punctuated regularly by zombie attacks. Some readers may not care for the abundance of world-building background-y passages; one of the reasons Feed is close to 600 pages (and it’s only the first in a trilogy) is that Grant spares very little detail in explaining how her fictional world got to the state it’s in. Others will find that they want to explore this world, that they enjoy seeing how all the pieces fit together. Meanwhile, you’ve got the relationship between Georgia and her reckless brother Shaun, and their growing realization that something is deeply, deeply wrong with this road to the White House—parts of the unfolding narrative are reasonably predictable, but Grant delivers some excellent surprises along the way. Given the completeness of this particular story, it will be interesting to see where she takes the two promised sequels: What else will she have to say about her zombie-ridden society?

9 June 2010 | read this |