Mira Grant (a.k.a. Seanan McGuire) returns readers to the world of her Newsflesh Trilogy, the world of 2040 where bloggers / online journalists hold a great deal of clout and the United States is in the middle of a Presidential Election. Good timing, with what is going on in the United States right now, isn’t it? The characters of the original Newsflesh novels are only mentioned as existing and don’t really appear, so knowing the full extent of those stories isn’t too important to enjoying Feedback. Here’s the publisher blurb:
There are two sides to every story…
We had cured cancer. We had beaten the common cold. But in doing so we unleashed something horrifying and unstoppable. The infection spread leaving those afflicted with a single uncontrollable impulse: FEED.
Now, twenty years after the Rising, a team of scrappy underdog reporters relentlessly pursue the facts while competing against the brother-and-sister blog superstars, the Masons.
Surrounded by the infected, and facing more insidious forces working in the shadows, they must hit the presidential campaign trail and uncover dangerous truths. Or die trying.
Feedback is a full-length Newsflesh novel that overlaps the events of the acclaimed first novel in the series, Feed, and offers a new entry point to this thrilling and treacherous world.
I enjoyed the original series quite a bit (Feed, Deadline, Blackout); great snarky characters, an inventive twist on a popular (one might say over used) trope, political intrigue; all of which added up to a fast-paced, entertaining read. The primary question for me with Feedback is two-fold: Could Grant/McGuire do it again? And could she do it again without making Feedback simply a retread of what came before in the original trilogy? I’ll have an answer at the end of the review.
As stated above, The Masons are just background characters who are mentioned but don’t interact with the plot and characters in Feedback. Grant introduces new characters: Aislinn “Ash” North (Irwin – the zombie fighter), Ben North (Newsie – classic reporter), Audrey Wen (Fictional – storyteller), and Mat (Make-up artist/techie). They are recruited by one of the Democratic candidates, Governor Susan Kilburn and proceed to follow Kilburn’s campaign until the campaign is plagued by calculated zombie attack after calculated zombie attack. The trappings of the story are similar enough to the original trilogy, but McGuirre gives Aislinn such a brash and wonderfully committed personality that she stands powerfully on her own. While her team fears for her life when she is in the field luring zombies, she also helps save people from unexpected zombie hoards. Ash is married to Ben, though since it is only for her green card, she is in a romantic relationship with Audrey. Adding complexity to the gang is Mat, a genderfluid person who goes by “them” rather than the binary he/she designations. These characters come alive through Ash’s narration and felt incredibly realized, natural, and genuine. They weren’t the typical heroes for a Zombie novel, but Grant/McGuire isn’t the typical writer. Nonetheless, their “atypicallness” did not feel forced as it easily could have in a lesser writer’s hands and pen. I empathized with them and thoroughly enjoyed being a part of their group for the roller-coaster ride that was Feedback.
So, Grant/McGuire has the character nailed down in Feedback, what about the story/plot? You might think running a plot in parallel to an already existing novel/storyline might not provide for suspense or gripping plot, especially if you’ve read those books. You’d be dead wrong, pun partially intended. While there are similar story beats and themes explored in the same world, seeing these things through the eyes/lens of a different point of view, especially a point of view on the opposite side of the political fence, made for a thoroughly enjoyable and gripping read. As a reader who knows of the conspiracy behind the events of the Newsflesh world, I found the narrative to hold even more tension as I read the novel anticipating with anxiety how and when Ash and her crew would find out and react. There was also a really clever and elegant shout-out to the work of Stephen King, among many other horror shout outs that made me smile.
I’ll admit I was a bit hesitant to dive into the book because of some of the reasons I mentioned, mainly, the potential that this could be a retread. However, I enjoyed Newsflesh enough and the other work I’ve sampled from McGuire that I dove in and soon enough those cautions were swept aside and expectations were exceeded as I was drawn in to the story like a hungry man to a feast.
Although readers who have read the first three Newsflesh novels may have a greater appreciation for some of the shout-outs to characters form those books, Feedback is also a pretty good starting point for the fiction of Mira Grant/Seanan McGuire.
Recommended
© 2016 Rob H. Bedford
Published by Orbit Books | Hardcover, October 2016
http://www.miragrant.com/series/newsflesh/
Review copy courtesy of the publisher
