The Forest Of Hands And Teeth
Author: Carrie Ryan
Published by: Gollancz

Hater
Author: David Moody
Published by: Gollancz

Zombies are very hip in literature right now. As well as Seth Grahame-Smith’s much-discussed Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, there’s John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Bringing Out The Dead, and in young adult fiction, Zombie Blondes by Brian James and the Generation Dead novels by Daniel Waters (the sequel, Kiss Of Life, is out this month.) And then Gollancz has released these two very different zombie novels, both by debut authors.

First published in 2006, David Moody’s Hater is the heir to Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, and is currently being made into a movie produced by Guillermo del Toro and directed by Juan Antonio Bayona (The Orphanage). The zombie plague is an outbreak of inexplicable, hate-fuelled murders committed by otherwise ordinary Britons. The protagonist, Danny McCoyne, is a harassed council worker and father of three who’s flat out just coping day to day. What will he do when the wave of violence reaches him?

Meanwhile, The Forest Of Hands And Teeth owes more to – don’t let this put you off – The Village by M Night Shyamalan. Generations after zombies destroyed the world as we know it, a fenced-off village is surviving as a tiny theocracy under a “Sisterhood” of nuns. A police force called the Guardians protects villagers from the “Unconsecrated” who lurk beyond the fences in the evocatively named Forest of Hands and Teeth. The heroine, Mary, is sure there’s an ocean somewhere beyond the forest, and when the village is finally overrun by Unconsecrated, she gets a chance to find out.

George Romero defined the zombie genre’s modern conventions: being bitten by a zombie turns you into one; they can only be killed by decapitation or destroying the brain. And as well as raising existential questions by blurring the line between life and death, Romero highlighted the genre’s allegorical aspects: zombies stand in for varieties of Otherness including reviled minorities, alternative philosophies and savage impulses.

Romero, too, finessed what we can call the ‘zombie narrative arc’, which is basically the classic ‘doomsday’ arc. In the first act, everyday life is gradually punctured by a series of unsettling incidents that are nonetheless easy to ignore, but by the time the protagonists realise zombies are abroad among the living, it’s too late.

In the second act, the faltering structures of civilisation break down altogether and the narrative focuses on a group of individuals whose relationships mirror society’s underlying tensions. They must fight the zombies as well as their own conflicts.

The third act follows individuals after they’ve abandoned even these ersatz social groups. Things are looking very grim by this point; protagonists seem to have little to live for. Happier zombie narratives rescue their protagonists by banishing the zombie threat or reaching a ’safe’ destination. Darker ones allow their protagonists no quarter at all.

The Forest Of Hands And Teeth adheres to this narrative arc much more faithfully than Hater. As in the best zombie tales, the Unconsecrated often seem more honest than the more ambiguous monstrosity of those who would keep them away. Like the shadowy monsters of Shyamalan’s The Village, the Unconsecrated are a convenient bogeyman to keep the village’s population cowed and compliant; the novel begins almost as a conspiracy thriller, as Mary strives to uncover what the Sisterhood wants to keep hidden from the villagers.

But as hinted by its shamelessly Twilight-pastiching cover, it’s also a romance. Mary loves Travis but his brother Harry loves Mary, while Travis is set to wed Mary’s best friend Cassandra, who loves Harry. It’s these four, plus Mary’s brother Jed, Jed’s wife Beth, a small child and a dog, who make up Hands And Teeth’s second-act posse and must face those most heartbreaking moments in zombie narratives: having to kill loved ones after they become infected and ‘turn’.

Hands And Teeth could have been much pulpier, but Ryan combines action and emotion without cheapening either. It’s an absorbing, suspenseful read with a satisfyingly bittersweet ending, and Ryan’s descriptions of the Unconsecrated are chillingly visceral.

Hater, too, is visceral. Its violence is brutal, explicit and obscene in its intrusion into the everyday, but emotionally, it’s also a punch to the gut. This is because the infection sweeping England doesn’t come in the form of death and return as a blood-ravening corpse. Rather, it’s a sudden sense of abject terror as you realise with a jolt that people will kill you if you don’t kill them first. The people infected by this realisation become known as Haters; but if you’re one of them, you believe other people hate you.

Ultimately – and for reasons that are never made clear in the book – humanity divides into two factions that cut across established tribalisms such as race, class, family, occupation and nation. This abstraction of human hatred comments on the mindless destructiveness of all human conflicts by questioning the arbitrariness of all human loyalties. Is hatred the only true human impulse?

First, though, Moody has fun with a slow, almost unbearably teeth-chattering take on the zombie narrative arc’s opening act. There’s plenty of bewildered media speculation and armchair analysis of the random acts of violence. Some characters in the book blame it on alcohol-fuelled yobbos, others on individual psychopaths or general moral decay. And it’s easy to see echoes of Hater in the public violence that seems so senseless: high-school shootings; suicide bombings; high-speed car crashes and bashings outside nightclubs.

Del Toro is right when he promises that “Hater will haunt you long after you read the last page.” It’s a powerful and disturbing novel, and I’m already anxious about how del Toro and Bayona might render it onscreen.