Julie’s been gushing over Alden Bell’s The Reapers are the Angels for quite some time now. She reviewed it, and then she kept mentioning it, and then she and Scott Daniels started up a new podcast just so that they could talk about it. I listened to the first half of the podcast, right up to the spoiler warning, and was curious enough to find a copy and read it so that I could listen to the second half.

One of the cover blurbs describes the book as “southern gothic: like Flannery O’Connor with zombies.” I can’t speak to that, as I’m not even sure what “southern gothic” is, and I’ve read very little Flannery O’Connor.

But what it is, is a zombie novel, set about twenty-five years after the zombie apocalypse. In Bell’s world, people who die and aren’t properly dispatched will come back as “meatskins”, barely sentient creatures with a taste for human flesh. Meatskins can be killed by destroying their brains; otherwise, they seem to last more or less for ever. Starvation doesn’t kill them, though it slows them down until they are almost inert. It’s clear that meatskins are no longer human, but only animals in human form.

Society has collapsed, naturally. There are little pockets of people here and there, scraping out a living from the remnants and huddling together in fortified buildings at night. And there are a few brave souls who travel about.

One of these is main character, a girl named Temple. She’s fifteen or sixteen, and hence has no memory of the days before the meatskins. She simply accepts them as part of the landscape. She feels uncomfortable with other people (for reasons I won’t go into) and likes to see the wonders that there are in the world; so she travels about. Along the way she kills a man who tries to rape her; the man’s brother feels compelled to avenge him, and the resulting pursuit forms most of the matter of the novel.

The most striking aspect of the novel, for me, is Temple’s approach to life in the world of the Zombies. They are dangerous, certainly, and not to be taken for granted; but they are just one of those things you have to deal with, like (in my world) paying the bills and taking out the trash, just part of the cost of living. In fact, she finds them much easier to deal with than the living, because they are so uncomplicated.

I liked the book; it’s surprisingly quite and peaceful considering the amount of death and destruction and violence it contains. I do have one complaint, from a science-fictional point of view. Early in the book, in an area with no living people other than herself, Temple gets some cheese crackers and soft drinks from an abandoned minimart, and finds a car by the side of the road that she’s able to hot-wire. One gathers that the bulk of the population became zombies in a very short time, leaving the world full of stores that are full of goods and the roads full of cars with tanks full of gasoline, and that the few remaining humans are still living on this stuff. OK, but twenty-five years later? I don’t buy it.

Still, The Reapers are the Angels isn’t really science-fiction; rather, it’s a reflection on what it means to be a person, on responsibility, on gratitude, and on justice versus mercy. Temple’s going to stick with me for a while, I think.