Pariah Review, Part Two

Fingerman is a comic book artist by trade, and I don't know his work. But if this book is any indication, he's one of those writers who think that being sardonic and sarcastic means you're being satirical. The book is filled with these smirky asides that are meant to be wry but just make me have to look away from the book for a few seconds to I can rub the bridge of my nose in exasperation.

There are a few genuinely scary sequences in the book, and they involve people from the apartment building going down to street level and walking amidst the zombies. (Sadly, the first of these scenes doesn't begin until page 300 of this 365-page novel.) The characters have been watching the zombies from the safety of their apartment building, but thanks to some form of protection or another, they gain the ability to set out among the undead. They see the crowd close-up for the first time.

Alan (a heroic artist!) discovers that if he covers himself completely (several layers of clothing, hoods, goggles), the zombies can't sense him, and he can walk among them undetected. It's a genuinely creepy sequence: he feels them jostle against him, glance at him as they shuffle past, casually grasp him; and his goggles gradually steam up and his visibility dwindles. But Fingerman undermines himself:

- - - - -To combat fear he kept his thoughts clinical. He'd absorb the detail he couldn't see from his window for future studies in watercolor and oils. Their skin was matte, but with oily patches, the pigment bleached or discolored. The white zombies were pasty yellow, the black ones gray and ashy. Even the matter underneath their shredded derma, the fasciae, peeled to reveal brown muscle tissue and dried bone. Everything looked desiccated. What you guys need is a good moisturizer, Alan thought. Some Oil of Olay or some Neutrogena. Something with a high SPF rating. I mean, look at you guys.- - - - -
That's keeping his thoughts clinical to avoid fear? He makes a bunch of artist's observations, which keeps with his artistic personality and is a nice touch. But then a completely out-of-character joke about skin care?

Earlier, a character named Eddie sets out into the world, gets overconfident, and gets eaten. This is not a spoiler, even though it happens less than 20 pages from the end. Eddie is an asshole, a sexist, a racist, and a Republican. He refers to himself in the third person by his college hockey nickname, "the Comet." He's violent, hypocritical, dumb, cowardly, and a homophobic closeted homosexual. There is no shading to his personality; every single thing he does, says, or thinks pounds home what a horrible person he is. The first time we meet him, he is talking about beating up his neighbor Mike so he can keep Mike's wife as a sex slave. Later, for good measure, he remorselessly rapes and murders an old woman. There is no way this book is going to end without Eddie being eaten by zombies.

His death scene takes place after he's run out of bullets in an abandoned bookstore:

- - - - -He looked over in the direction Mona had been to find empty wall. The fuck? Confusion followed by the incomparable sensation of jagged teeth bearing down on bare shoulder meat. His.- - - - -
Oh, "his"? Thanks for clarifying whose shoulder he feels getting bitten.


I need to point something out: I am not a zombie expert. I think they're fascinating. But I am not steeped in the lore. So maybe I'm wrong when I say that generally the rule is that you turn into a zombie if you get bitten by a zombie. I thought that of all the malleable rules and regulations about how modern zombieism works, that was pretty standard: you have to have a point of infection. But that's not the case in Pariah. Three different people die of non-zombie causes and end up being reanimated. So apparently all you have to do to become a zombie is die.

I was surprised at this choice, but I was willing to go along if it served some kind of purpose. But that purpose never came. The three reanimated corpses don't do anything to make the story much different; as reanimated corpses go, they are pretty much nonentities. So why introduce that detail?

(This is shutting the barn doors after the horses have left, but: Spoiler Alert.)

Ellen gets pregnant. Faced with the thought of bringing a child into a horrible world like this, she decides she should take a dose of RU-486 and induce a miscarriage. Something awesome and terrible started to occur to me…

What if she took the pill and killed her fetus… and then, since any human who dies becomes a zombie, the unborn child in her womb became reanimated and ate its way out of her body??

It is sick and wrong and wicked, but it would have been delightful. But as soon as it occurred to me, I knew Fingerman would not do it. First of all, Ellen, despite having no redeeming qualities to speak of, is supposed to be someone the reader likes, and Fingerman wouldn't let something that gruesome happen to her. And second, at this point the fetus would be a cluster of cells no bigger than a jellybean. (The mouth doesn't even begin to develop until Week Four, and the ability to devour flesh even later.)

Anyway. I have let myself get too obsessed with how frustrating the book was. After all, I did finish it. I could have set it down and picked up For Whom the Bell Tolls at any point, but I kept going.

I guess I thought, this once, I could trust Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy, who called this the "thinking man's zombie novel." But it didn't have enough terror to be enjoyed as a horror novel, nor was it well-written enough to justify the lack of terror.