Dust [Hardcover]

Plot Summary: Killed in a car accident as a young teen, Jessie woke up in her coffin under six feet of earth and clawed her way out to live as a zombie. She met up with a gang of semi-reclusive zombies who haunt the woods of Calumet County, Indiana, and she's been with them ever since. Jessie eschews eating humans - who live in barricaded townships against the zombie menace - and she lives off deer, possum, duck, and any other animal she can hunt. Despite her supernatural strength, Jessie's body will slowly decompose, bloat, become infested with bugs, and then dry up. Despite this grim future, Jessie's survival instinct is strong, and she has a lot of affection for some of the zombies in her gang. When strange-smelling creatures, halfway between dead and alive, begin to infiltrate the forest, Jessie suspects that some of her fellow zombies have caught a new disease, and she tries to piece it all together. What she can't imagine is that she's intimately involved with this new threat to zombies and humans alike, and it will change society forever.

After I read the first chapter I realized that I wouldn't be eating any food while reading Dust. My roast beef sandwich just wasn't palatable after reading about these maggot-ridden zombies who shamble around spitting out black "coffin liquor" while losing body parts in the woods. I give author Joan Frances Turner an A for her vivid, stomach-churning descriptions, because when I'm reading a book about zombies, I want to be grossed out. It's par for the course.

Dust has an interesting premise. The zombies in Ms. Turner's vision retain enough of their humanity to socialize, communicate, and enjoy their undead life, but their hunger instincts eliminate any compassion they might feel for the humans and animals they eat. Zombies can live for centuries, and they communicate via a sort of telepathy, since lips, throats and tongues start to decay soon after death. I can't say I've encountered this kind of zombie before, and I was able to suspend my disbelief for the most part and revel in their disgusting nature. They didn't win my heart, which is kind of a shame since they are "humanized" zombies, but I was rooting for them by the end. The humans themselves didn't elicit any of my sympathy, strangely enough.

The plot unfolds with a series of small, seemingly unconnected events, and by the end there's a full-on plague that practically wipes out life on Earth. I thought it was over several times, but there were more and more pages to read, so I was impressed at how it kept twisting and turning toward its conclusion. Unfortunately the pacing is a little hampered by dreams, flashbacks, and existential passages that made for slow reading at times, but it did build up into something that was exciting to read.

"My right arm fell off today.Lucky for me, I'm left handed." So begins the story of Jessie Anne Porter. She was killed when she was a teenager and her father crashed into a pickup truck.

Jessie remembers having to crawl to the surface of her grave. Somehow she had become a zombie. She wasn't bothered by her stink but was consumed with hunger and drawn to the scent of a rabbit in the cemetery.

Jessie joins a group of zombies, the Fly-by-Nights. Unlike traditional zombies, the mutated beings had human traits. Florian was ancient and philosophical, Teresa is the pack leader and is territorial and demonstrates jealousy of Jessie.

When Jessie meets Joe, she describes him "The...right side of his face was smashed in..crushed cheekbone...maggots seethed from every pore."

It demands certain discipline for the uniniated to read a zombie story. I was constantly grossed out as, at one point a large beetle emerged from one zombie who made the transition from a bloater to a breeder.

A new illness is discovered which causes the undead beings to grow new skin and muscles and become more lifelike. At the same time, humans or hoos become near death and often wish to be killed.

The story continues with groups attempting to gain power but this illness seems like an epidemic and the reader must learn the effect on both groups.

Jessie and Florian are unique characters and the novel gets a good mark for originality and the telling of a tale. I did think that the novel was too long in developing the main part of the story and could have been condensed.

I ordered a pre-release of Dust hoping for some fun to hold me over until The Living Dead: The Beginning is released. Instead of the typical ultraviolent zombie bloodbath that I was expecting, Dust delivered an intense, disturbingly realistic post-apocalyptic world, told by a sympathetic hero, who happens to be dead. If you are tempted to dismiss this book off-the-top as a copycat "through the eyes of the undead" rip off of Anne Rice's famous stories or Breathers: A Zombie's Lament don't worry this book is a VERY different beast. The world is totally bleak and scary and the characters are trying stay "alive" (... errr undead... errr sentient) instead of puttering around in the world of the living. Probably the closest book I have read to this is I Am Legend (not the movie). Both books paint a similar depressing horror world but this one offers 24 hour high-speed full-color zombie hell instead of the slower pace, safe in the daylight world of I am Legend.

While this is not a really gory book by modern zombie standards (dismemberment is rare) it is not for the faint of heart. The heroine is falling apart (literally) and she deals with the undead who are putrefying and are chronically infested with bugs. Some sections will leave you applauding for the excellent grossness and going to get a can of Raid.

While I love this book it is not without flaws. The descriptions of the zombies communicating telepathically with musical overtones and the group dancing is really distracting and pulled me away from the flow of the text in a couple places.

Even with the weaknesses this book is exceptionally hard to put down and a truly excellent nightmarish adventure.