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"Feed" by Mira Grant

• Written by Jeremy Shane on Friday, October 22 2010 and posted in Reviews

The next review in our halloween zombie run is the first volume of the Newsflesh trilogy- Feed.  It is a must read for any zombie lover.

Genre:  Urban Fantasy, Zombie

Rating: 4 smileys


Cover Blurb:

"Alive or dead, the truth won't rest. My name is Georgia Mason, and I am begging you. Rise up while you can."

The year was 2014. We had cured cancer. We had beaten the common cold. But in doing so we had created something new, something terrible that no one could stop. The infection spread, virus blocks taking over buddies and minds with one, unstoppable command: FEED.

Now, twenty years after the Rising, Georgia and Shaun Mason are on the trail of the biggest story of their lives—the dark conspiracy behind the infected. The truth will out, even if it kills them.

Review

Zombie stories have been on the rise lately and as much as I enjoy them, I'm also still a little hesitant to just pick up every story I see.  Feed had a slightly different setup than most zombie stories and that is what caught my interest.

It takes place twenty years after the zombie outbreak.  People have learned to live with it (so to speak) and have adjusted the way they live based on the threat of zombies.  Instead of a book based solely on survival, I enjoyed getting to see how they went about their lives in this new world.  The security measures, testings, decontaminations, etc.  I also enjoyed her version of the zombie plague and how it worked (which I won't spoil here).

Something else I liked about her book was her terminology.  One thing that bugs me in zombie books is when they try and come up with different names for the zombies.  I have little doubt if such a thing ever happened, the world would definitely refer to them as zombies.  Not only does she embrace this, but also shows us more slang and references to Romero himself.  She does a great job of tying it into pop culture as if it would actually be if we had a zombie outbreak.

Feed follows the story of a team of news bloggers and is told from the perspective of the leader of that team: Georgia Mason.  After the zombie plague destroyed our old world, many news organizations were inept, slow or jaded in their coverage (much like they are now) and people ended up getting the most reliable and current news from internet blogs.  Now these news blogs are the next big thing and our team is hired by one of the presidential candidates to follow along on his campaign.  Again, taking us away from the typical zombie survival story.

Mira Grant fleshes out the blogging world and our character's own news blog as well as building an interesting story around the campaign while at the same time giving us more and more of the zombie story.  She gives us a rich cast of characters and shows us their own histories and motivations.  The end of the book pleasantly surprised me as well.

Bottom Line:

If you enjoy zombie stories or urban fantasy like "World War Z" or "The Dresden Files" you should definitely give Feed a try.  It has great characters, good pacing, an interesting story and of course- plenty of zombies.  It's available now as a paperback release.



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