Handling the Undead

This is a story about the psychological and issues of dealing with the dead coming back, centering on three different families who recently lost a loved one and are in different stages of the grieving process.

It is a “came back wrong” type of story in which the dead create a phenomenon where the living can hear each other's thoughts in their presence. Having no emotions of their own, the dead act as a channel, taking on the emotions of any living people near them.

As far as horror content, this is more about emotions and relationships rather than action, conflict, or visceral thrills. There are some disturbing moments and gore but mostly I found this book to be strange and sad as opposed to scary.

I like that there is no reason given for the beginning or abrupt end of the happening. It is about the effects not the cause. It's an interesting read that I'm not entirely sure I've fully wrapped my head around yet. The three storylines dwindle away rather than coming to a sharp point, reminiscent of “not with a bang but a whimper.”

Handling the Undead starts out with a lot of potential. Instead of just having scary zombies chomping on brains, the book opens with the dead rising, but not as monsters. The undead (or reliving, as they're called in the book) are ambulatory vegetables, who occasionally show glimpses of infant-like cognizance. The characters in the novel are forced to deal with the return of their dead loved ones not in the sense of “Holy crap! Grandpa's back and he wants to eat my brains!” but “Hey, Grandpa's back, as a smelly, half-rotted, largely helpless walking corpse. Now what do we do with him?” And when the novel focuses on the emotional drama of the reliving, it is very good, especially the plot about the reporter who digs up his dead grandson to make sure the military doesn't get him first. Unfortunately the book moves away from the emotional drama and into kooky psychic nonsense. Turns out the reliving let living people around them read each other's minds, which has dire, if poorly explicated consequences.

This transition to psychic gobbledygook reminds me of Johan Theorin's The Darkest Room, which started out as an excellent psychological/emotional thriller but eventually wandered into the realm of the supernatural, with disappointing results. If Handling the Undead had stayed focused on the characters of Mahler and David (who lost their grandson and wife, respectively) it could have been a fantastic and intelligent addition to the zombie genre. Instead, it adds in subplots about psychic phenomenon, emo cutters, and religious nutjobs preaching the end of days, all of which detract from the strengths of the novel.