LMST 345_Topic: Old Weird vs. New Weird: Monster Island_A Zombie Novel by David Wellington
LMST 345
Old Weird and New Weird
Read: Monster Island: A Zombie Novel by David Wellington
As the first book of a trilogy, Monster Island, by David Wellington, centers the experience of Dekalb, a former United Nations weapon inspector, who is sent on a journey to retrieve, desperately needed AIDs medication for a Somolian Warlord, in return for the safekeeping of her daughter.
Taking place in Manhattan, New York a month after the city has been infested with zombies, Dekalb returns to her home, along with a band of heavily armed East African school girls - turned child soldiers to gain intel on what was happening, as well as bring back the high demand drugs. While navigating through the mission, the group faces numerous zombie attacks, and eventually stumble upon an “undead medical student”, Gary Fleck, who unlike other zombies has figured out a way to maintain a high level of human intelligence, the group finds that all is not what is not it seems.
In the reading, Wellington ropes the reader in with the vivid depictions of what the characters are experiencing; describing their situations in a way that evokes an eerie feeling within the audience. A quote that I really like from the novel, came at the end of chapter 1: “ One of the girls opened up with her rifle, a controlled burst, three shots. Chut chut chut chopping up the greywater. Chut chut chut and the bullets tore through the red windbreaker, tore open the woman’s neck. Chut chut chut and her head popped open like an overripe melon and she sank, slipping beneath the water without a sound and still, pressed up against the railing on Liberty Island, a hundred more reached for us. Reached with pleading skeletal hands to clutch at us, to take what was theirs. Your huddled masses. Give me your dead, I thought. The ship heeled hard over to one side as Osman finally brought her around, nosed around the edge ofLiberty Island and kept us from running up on the rocks. Give me your wretched dead, yearning to devour, your shambling masses. Give me. That was what they were thinking, wasn’t it? The living dead over there on the island. If there was any spark left in their brains, any thought possible to decayed neurons it was this: give me. Give me. Give me your life, your warmth, your flesh. Give me.” I felt like this quote really grabbed my attention and emphasized a shift in mood.
Though uncanny, the fascination that we as an audience have with the idea of an apocalypse is driven by the natural intuition in us to be curious about the possibilities of what happens when life as we know it is completely destroyed. Studies show that, as a collective, our more recent vision of what the future holds has been altered drastically in comparison to what was perceived in the past, resulting in stories like this where we have a chance to visualize our “what ifs”. This shift in realities has been proven to be linked to historical traumas, such as WWII and various terrorist attacks. Incidents of mass destruction have brought about disturbing realizations of “ the human capacity of violence” causing people to have less hope for what’s to come. In conclusion, Monster Island can be considered a “weird” novel in the literal sense, that the plot involves the reanimation of corpses as zombies, but also in the way that it brings about ideas of what our future could possibly hold.
Taking place in Manhattan, New York a month after the city has been infested with zombies, Dekalb returns to her home, along with a band of heavily armed East African school girls - turned child soldiers to gain intel on what was happening, as well as bring back the high demand drugs. While navigating through the mission, the group faces numerous zombie attacks, and eventually stumble upon an “undead medical student”, Gary Fleck, who unlike other zombies has figured out a way to maintain a high level of human intelligence, the group finds that all is not what is not it seems.
In the reading, Wellington ropes the reader in with the vivid depictions of what the characters are experiencing; describing their situations in a way that evokes an eerie feeling within the audience. A quote that I really like from the novel, came at the end of chapter 1: “ One of the girls opened up with her rifle, a controlled burst, three shots. Chut chut chut chopping up the greywater. Chut chut chut and the bullets tore through the red windbreaker, tore open the woman’s neck. Chut chut chut and her head popped open like an overripe melon and she sank, slipping beneath the water without a sound and still, pressed up against the railing on Liberty Island, a hundred more reached for us. Reached with pleading skeletal hands to clutch at us, to take what was theirs. Your huddled masses. Give me your dead, I thought. The ship heeled hard over to one side as Osman finally brought her around, nosed around the edge ofLiberty Island and kept us from running up on the rocks. Give me your wretched dead, yearning to devour, your shambling masses. Give me. That was what they were thinking, wasn’t it? The living dead over there on the island. If there was any spark left in their brains, any thought possible to decayed neurons it was this: give me. Give me. Give me your life, your warmth, your flesh. Give me.” I felt like this quote really grabbed my attention and emphasized a shift in mood.
Though uncanny, the fascination that we as an audience have with the idea of an apocalypse is driven by the natural intuition in us to be curious about the possibilities of what happens when life as we know it is completely destroyed. Studies show that, as a collective, our more recent vision of what the future holds has been altered drastically in comparison to what was perceived in the past, resulting in stories like this where we have a chance to visualize our “what ifs”. This shift in realities has been proven to be linked to historical traumas, such as WWII and various terrorist attacks. Incidents of mass destruction have brought about disturbing realizations of “ the human capacity of violence” causing people to have less hope for what’s to come. In conclusion, Monster Island can be considered a “weird” novel in the literal sense, that the plot involves the reanimation of corpses as zombies, but also in the way that it brings about ideas of what our future could possibly hold.
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