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Happiness and Sunshine in the Zombie Apocalypse

Author: David Wellington

Finn has lived his life safe from the aftereffects of the zombie apocalypse. The surviving parts of the world are hunkered into fortified home bases. His home base is in New York, where he regularly listens to the paranoid older generation tell stories of horror and helps fish in the Subway tunnels, wondering what they must have looked like before. He is protected. He is happy. He, like the others his age, makes fun of the older generations, many of whom are too terrified to leave their skyrises. That’s until Finn discovers that he might be infected. The infection can happen within hours or take up to twenty years. There are two more years before he will know for sure, and the community is not willing to take a chance. Finn is sent away, but when his transport is disrupted by road pirates, he is left to fend for himself in the wilderness. Here, he discovers that there are things worse than the undead: other people.

David Wellington captured my imagination and love of the weird and terrifying with Paradise-1, The Last Astronaut, and Overwinter. In these stories, Wellington captured pathos as well as horror, complex characters faced with fantastical, evocative situations and monstrous transformations. Zombie stories are one of my favorites, so when I encountered a David Wellington zombie tale, I was all in, despite the 400+ pages. Unfortunately, Positive does not capture the glory of David Wellington at his imaginative and emotive best.

The action happens quickly, forcing Finn from his home and exposing him to the real world. Ostensibly, this is a coming-of-age tale. Despite being a child of the post-apocalyptic landscape, Finn is sheltered. He doesn’t know about the real world, about what humans are capable of, and about what he himself is willing to do to survive. Sadly, over 400+ pages later, he comes away unchanged, an idealist in the middle of a bloodbath, irritatingly leading a group of other potential infected, spreading his delusions of a happily-ever-after world where grit and determination and just being a darn good guy can combat the nemesis of death. It’s not realistic, even for zombie fiction, and Finn’s goody two-shoes nature is so one dimensional that it is boring. Yes, we want a stalwart hero who holds to principles, but moments of despair and even of temptation are necessary to make this character real. But Finn is stagnant. He will see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, and so he walks the dystopian landscape in the dullest way possible, a teenage savior who overshares and slows down everything.

The novel essentially has three main segments: one where Finn is adopted into a road pirate gang, one where he is imprisoned in a concentration-like camp for the infected, and one where he leads a band of potential infected to create a new civilization. Each segment is far too drawn out, the action being purely told and never shown. It’s like reading the diary of an emotionally stunted, forever optimistic, incapable-of-seeing subtly thirteen-year-old. It’s hard to pick up, hard to force oneself to continue, and impossible to truly enjoy.

If the telling had been condensed and the novel had been allowed to show instead of just tell, perhaps it would have been more palatable, but the random moments of all-out action are stranded in seas of everyone having to explain every little thing to Finn about real life. It’s onerous. It’s boring. It’s tedious.

The other characters suffer similar fates to Finn. No one here is real or well rounded. Everyone is a walking stereotype. The zombies barely matter and aren’t horrific. The human villains are super-bad; they laugh maniacally while riding motorbikes and Mad Maxing around the countryside instilling terror and killing wantonly. Finn’s group is predictably weak and complaining, except his hardened champions who for some reason follow a 17-year-old (or is he 20 now?) with no experience of their world because gosh darn it, he’s just a nice dude.

It ends in a protracted, unrealistic sequence, where even the army must come in and bow to Finn’s overt goodness and poorly planned ballsy-ness. It’s a new dawn in zombie land, because now the infected are treated well, and everyone has food to eat and everyone is happy, and the sun never stops shining, and the baddies pay for their crimes, and new life is brought into the world and blahhhh blahhhh blahhh. It’s so saccharine sweet, so unrelatable, so unearned. Even the zombies refused to show up past the halfway point in the book, evidentially knowing that there were no brains to be had in this bunch. Not recommended. There was potential in the story, but it remains undelivered and sadly uninspired. I’ll still follow David Wellington, because at his best the dude is a story genius, but this one wasn’t his best work, and it shows.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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