A Questionable Shape by Bennett Sims

by Bennett Sims

*Bard Fiction Prize 2014
* The Believer  Book Award Finalist
*One of the Best Books of 2013 -- Complex Magazine ,  Book Riot ,  Slate ,  The L Magazine ,  NPR's 'On Point,'   Salon

Mazoch discovers an unreturned movie sleeve, a smashed window, and a pool of blood in his father's house; the man has gone missing. So he creates a list of his father's haunts and asks Vermaelen to help track him down.

However, hurricane season looms over Baton Rouge, threatening to wipe out any undead not already contained, and eliminate all hope of ever finding Mazoch's father.

Bennett Sims turns typical zombie fare on its head to deliver a wise and philosophical rumination on the nature of memory and loss.

Genres: Fiction, Horror, Zombies, Science Fiction, Literary Fiction, Read For School, Science Fiction Fantasy

Mass Market Paperback

First published April 26, 2013

About the author

Bennett Sims was born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His fiction has appeared in A Public Space, Tin House, and Zoetrope: All-Story. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he currently teaches at the University of Iowa, where he is the Provost Postgraduate Visiting Writer in fiction.

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

So it is as if the undead are constantly being fed mnemonic madeleines, except that the tea the madeleines are steeped in is actually Lethe water: the crumbs from each memory come soggy with their own forgetfulness.

From the blurbs. "...David Foster Wallace...", "...Thomas Bernhard....", "...Nicholson Baker...", "...Nabokov...". "Zombies"

Sold. I'm in.

One blurb says, "is part George A. Romero, part Thomas Bernhard". I think that's a good quick summation of the book.

Zombies.

Have you noticed they have been quite the rage lately? In order not to get too bored with them they have been presented in all kinds of versions. There are fast zombies. Strong zombies. Smart zombies. Zombies that can fall in love. Funny zombies. All different kind of mythologies for how they've come about. Different ways of being killing them. Different ways of getting infected.

Yeah there are general rules, but everyone has their own little tweak.

You've got make things a little new and interesting if you want to suck on the udder of the cash cow.

Most zombie stories are survival stories. They are stories of small victories that will let the heroes live a little longer but with the inevitability that life isn't going to get better. The zombies are going to win. which makes sense, since they are just de-personified versions of death.

This book doesn't really do any of these things. It's fairly old school and true to the original George Romero, Night of the Living Dead, or the bleaker sequel, Dawn of the Dead.

If you remember at the end of the first movie there is a mixed optimism. The living have begun to contain the zombies. They are being rounded up. The behavior of the people rounding them up doesn't speak favorably for the better parts of being human, but the movie ends on the positive note that we can contain and beat this zombie problem.

Is Dawn of the Dead supposed to be in the same universe? Is this supposed to be later on in the zombie wars? I'm not sure, I think of it as a different world altogether, but it doesn't matter. Again the zombies are shambling slow moving beasts who do repetetive actions and moan a lot. They are the ones that aren't that difficult to avoid, it's just that when there are a lot of them difficulties start. These are the zombies in this book. And the exchange from Dawn of the Dead:

"What are they doing? Why do they come here?"

"Some kind of instinct. Memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives."

This line is meant as a critique of our consumer society, with so many people in their undeath flocking to the mall, but ignoring the place it-self being referred to, this line is the essential part of the zombie mythos that A Questionable Shape picks up and runs with.

The novel takes place in Baton Rouge a couple of months after the zombie outbreak occurred. By the time the story begins things have begun to get back to normal. Zombies have been quarantined, and rare stragglers are captured and locked up. Things haven't returned to normal, but people are getting on with their lives.

Humans have an amazing ability to quickly adapt to unthinkable situations. Our minds let us cope with them, even if in a numb or slightly shut down state.

There is a vague sense of danger still lurking in the outside world. And that world is still quite depopulated (I'm not sure where most of the survivors are in this story, they seem to just stay home behind their boarded up windows I guess). But people seem more afraid of an outside world where there may be tainted food or drinks or something that could cause them to become infected rather than getting attacked by the relatively docile zombies that might still be wandering around being drawn to places that were important to them in life.

You have more chance of being attacked by a shark in Florida than bitten by a zombie in Baton Rogue, one character says when they are trouncing through a field. Doing something that the CDC Fight the Bite pamphlet would warn against (as a note, the CDC actually has a graphic novel about what to do in the event of a Zombie Outbreak. Seriously (ok it's sort of a fun way of teaching Emergency Preparedness. I reviewed it here: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... (shameless self-promotion), but if you click on the title info, and then click more details you can get a link to read it yourself for free, or you can just ignore my link and google this yourself)).

The story follows two grad student types. An English major who is making daily rounds of all the places important to his missing father in hopes of finding his presumed undead remains wandering around; and the narrator a philosophy student who is going along for moral support and possibly some back up if something happens.

The story takes place during the last week of a month that these two are going to spend looking for the lost father. Hurricane season is fast approaching and their hopes of finding the undead version of the English major's father are dwindling.

Why are they looking for the father? To kill him? To come to a sense of closure? To save him from the inevitable second death he'll experience during the hurricanes that annually batter this part of the country?

This is one of the many questions that the narrator ponders in their daily treks from the fathers dilapidated house, to fast food restaurants he liked to eat at, antique shops he visited and other places charged with emotional significance to his son who thinks these are the places my dad would return to if he was just mindlessly drawn back to emotionally important places.

Could you accurately pick the places the person you love most in the world would be drawn to in undeath? The places that meant most to them, where they were happiest, where the stirrings of nostalgia would pull hardest? Would you be able to accept that the person you loved most in the world may be drawn to places that had no connection to you?

The book has meditations and ramblings about all sorts of topics. It's a little heavy on the philosophy at times, which is ok by me, but I could see it getting a little much for some people.

One of my favorite parts of the book, that isn't about fathers dying and drawing parallels between zombies and watching a loved one deteriorate into a zombie like state (I'm trying not to think of this as morbid that I found the passages dealing with this stuff quite interesting, I'm going to just leave it at that though), is about the narrators reading habits.

Why did I read him (Kant) then? Because scholarly comprehension seemed valuable and because I looked forward to the day when each great thinker, like a grocery item, was scratched off my list; because in certain circles, quoting or paraphrasing or alluding to the fact of having read Kant carried potent social cachet; because the thick gray spine of the Critique of Pure Reason was so conspicuous on my to-read shelf, so baldly visible a monument to my ignorance (not like the niggardll maroon spine of Descartes' Meditations, which it was easy for a cursory glance to pass over, and so which I could comfortable leave on the to-read shelf, even though my not having read it was in some ways even more embarrassing and scandalous than my not having read the first Critique), that I couldn't bear to invite fellow philosophy majors over to my dorm without prematurely promoting it to my shelf of read books, where of course it would torment me, like the beating ot a telltale heart...

And.

Where all my motives so petty, designed merely to elevate my self-image, rather than my intellect or my spirit? No, I read, too, in the pursuit of things that seemed in inspired moments ineffable and vast, and noble in their vastness. But for the most part reading was just a joyless war of attrition with my to-read list. Which, needless to say, was a war of attrition that the list easily won, marshalling in it's favor factorial laws so ancient, so textbbook hydracephalic, that they're almost cliched: for every book I disposed of I acquired three. Nor was I even able to read these books with great rigor of systematicity, feverish as I was to be finished.

And finally...

In a manner of speaking, my only goal in reading was to outlive my to-read list, to finish it before time and mortality finished me. And I was willing to make the appropriate sacrifices (a robust social life, for instance) to see this project through.

I chose to quote heavily from the section where the narrator lies in bed wondering why his girlfriend and his friend have no trouble reading since the zombie thing happened, but he can't read at all, and just for the self-deprecating and overly aware way that he looks at his own reading, and the way it kind of reminds me of my own thoughts I've shared it, but there are so many good parts to this book. so many interesting little thoughts, like the observation that the wake that follows a duck swimming looks like a parentheses, and how the parentheses relates to the undead. Or all the Levinas-esque otherness/alterity/exteriority stuff. To me the book is kind of like taking a field trip through my philosophy interests, with zombies for a tour guide.

A zombie book for literature and philosophy nerds. You know you wanna read it.

(afterthought: I read somewhere on goodreads that the author was a student of DFW. The book is dedicated to Dave, which may or may not be DFW, but I'm assuming it is. This is a quite good DFW inspired book, without reading too much like someone trying to be DFW (except maybe for the footnotes, but of course those are also theorized at one point as having a relation to the undead.))

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

An often dazzling philosophical zombie debut. Sims is a serious talent.

[nostalgebraist · Rating 3 out of 5]

At its core, this is a book about a zombie outbreak, and a sad young man's quest to find, and possibly kill, his newly zombified father. The young man, Matt, is accompanied on his hunt by a friend, Mike -- the narrator -- who tells us about his friend, and also about his own (Mike's) meditations on zombie consciousness and zombie ethics, and about the way light looks when reflected/refracted by various types of leaves/fabrics/construction materials, and about the reasons he personally used to feel motivated to read Kant but now no longer feels motivated to read Kant, and about the way the waves a duck makes on a lake look like parentheses, and how when his girlfriend mentions that fact to him he feels like she's reading his mind, which reminds him of how the lines used to indicate telepathy in comic books also look like parentheses, and . . . well. It's a bit digressive, this book.

So the twist here is that this is a book about zombies that is also about the fine details of moment-to-moment consciousness. It's not about mortal peril or how to improvise a stronghold that the zombies won't be able to breach; it's about being a sensitive person, attuned to things like the quality of a room's light or the shape of the waves on a lake, living in a world where zombies are now a (largely distant, largely non-threatening) reality. Where an ordinary zombie story would focus on the perilous here-and-now, intending to produce or emulate in the reader the time-compressing effects of adrenaline, Sims' narrator luxuriates in spiraling, goalless digressions. The book is full of footnotes, though in a book that is about 75% digression the boundary between main-text material and footnote material seems largely arbitrary. Mike has his reasons, though:

Since the outbreak, I have often reflected that this footnote is the typographic mark most emblematic of undeath. By opening up a subjacent space on the page, the footnote digs a grave in the text, an underworld in the text. The words that are banished there are like thoughts the text has repressed, pushed down into its unconscious. But they go on disturbing it from beneath, such that if the text were ever infected, they are the words that would guide it. Footnotes are a text's phantom feet.

This quote encapsulated the problems I had with this book. Because the quote . . . well, I don't know how else to put this -- it strikes me as bullshit. If Mike were more interested generally in the connection between undeath and "the unconscious" (in the psychological sense), this might seem more grounded. But for the most part, he makes it sound like the undead act on simplistic, surface-level stuff like muscle memory and knowledge about oft-visited places, not anything as dramatic or psychologically interesting as "repressed thoughts." There's also the dubious link between footnotes -- which after all are right there on the page, if in slightly smaller print, and will be read immediately by any diligent reader -- and "repressed thoughts." This strikes me as the kind of thing a canny college student, in the early AM hours, might write in a paper -- and the kind of thing the more lenient and ebullient sort of professor, skimming through that student's paper an hour or two into a long night of grading, might annotate in pen with the marginal note: "Interesting!" It's the kind of thought that gleams for a moment in your mind, but with a gleam that dims if you actually spend any time thinking about it (the sort of time which college students, and college professors, often lack).

Far too many of Mike's meditations and nifty ideas are like this: merely pretty rather than insightful, "interesting!" rather than interesting. The promising premise of a slow, meditative account of life with zombies is not well served by a meditator who's so undergraduate-smart, so flashy and so dull. For a lot of the book I couldn't help but read it as some sort of fish-out-of-water comedy about a guy who tries to apply his liberal arts education to absolutely everything, up to and including the zombie apocalypse, a guy who's still trying to write professor-pleasing papers when not only college, but also the human world as he once knew it, is an irrecoverable thing of the past. But I honestly can't tell how much Bennett Sims himself is on board with that idea. How much ironic distance is there between author and narrator? If this is a story about a man stuck in college it can't quite be a story about zombies and fathers at the same time, can it? (Oh, it certainly could -- but what I'm saying is that the narrator stuck out to me so much that he in a lot of ways overwhelmed the events he was tasked with describing.)

Sims is undoubtedly a very talented writer, with an impressive vocabulary and a way with metaphors. Even then, though, it's hard for me to tell where Sims ends and his anal-retentive narrator begins. For instance, what am I supposed to make of a sentence like the following (about the way Mike feels driven to read in order to reach some sort of unequivocal state of well-educatedness):

What ultimately sustained and what alone could have sustained me were my teloi, specifically the illusion of progress that attended them, whereby I convinced myself that I was closer to my goal at twenty-four than I had been at twenty.

The word "teloi" jumps out here, not just because it's uncommon but because it's hard to see why it's necessary. It means "purposes" or "goals," and you could substitute either of those into the sentence without appreciably changing its meaning. "Teloi" simply is the way you say "purposes" or "goals" if you're speaking in Greek. Why use a Greek term in English? Well, Greek is an important language in academia, for a number of reasons (Renaissance heritage, technical terms formed from Greek roots, etc.), and as a result academics like to use words like "telos." In the context that surrounds the above sentence, I can't think of any other reason to use that word. I want to grab Mike/Sims and ask him/them: is this the right word? An apt, intriguing, beautiful word? Or is it just a word you think your professor would like?

Which line of questioning pretty much sums up the (pretty but questionable) shape of A Questionable Shape. Again, though, I have no idea what this says about Sims as a writer. Can I get his ingenious metaphors and his pleasant rhythms without the whole "undergrad desperate to impress his seminar leader" act? Or are the two an indivisible package?

The story about Matt Mazoch searching for his father is great, and the last 40 pages are excellent. This could have made a very good short story, and could very easily make one if you cut out all the speculation on "geospatial anamnestic kernels" that accrete in living brains and guide the undead, the preening descriptions of stuff like a lamp "whose central pole branches out into three adjustable eyestalks, forming an ommatophorous torchiere," and so forth. Mike, who's supposed to be this book's selling point, is in fact its weakest link.

[Marisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

my initial misgivings about this book were pretty much correct; I ended up just skipping the page-long footnotes and cringing every time the author used another $0.75 word, when a $0.50 one would do. adding insult to injury, I found the lone female character to be a vague stereotype of a "liberal arts girlfriend". perhaps Mr. Simms should have invested less time waxing poetic in his footnotes and looking up words with his thesaurus (seriously: I'm not a dumb girl. he uses words even the most pretentious lit professor would find obnoxious), and more time creating characters we could care about.

[Marc Kozak · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven't had to deal with the loss of a loved one many times in my life. I am extremely thankful I haven't had someone close to me pass away for a very long time. I do, however, have this vivid memory of visiting my grandfather in Florida as a child. I'm not sure I completely understood at the time why I was going down to visit. At that point in my life, I had only happy memories of visiting my grandparents in Florida - going to Busch Gardens, swimming in their pools, travelling to entertaining attractions - it was always a vacation in the true sense of the word.

I remember bits and pieces of the building we went to. Sidewalks and trees, welcoming, comfortable. I think I remember that grandpa was sick, and we were paying him a visit. Inside, things were quiet. Someone showed us into a room, and there was grandpa in a bed. He looked different. He was surrounded by tubes, like a statue covered in vines. He was dying from Alzheimers.

I remember that he couldn't make words, only sounds. I remember his face clearly, his mouth open wide, as we surrounded his bed. I remember my parents speaking to him like nothing was wrong, fussing over blankets, asking how he was feeling, pointing my sister and I out to him, keeping it together in a way I'm not sure I could have were I in their position. I remember standing quietly, not hearing what anyone else was saying, staring at my grandfather's eyes, and all I could think was, what is he seeing right now? What were we to him at that moment? Were we figures that pulled associations and memory to the forefront of his recognition, like a magnet attracting the past? Or were we bits of smoke and shadow, forming unclear visions that eventually become transparent?

He was being sustained, until eventually he wasn't.





I was close to someone in college who lost their father in adolescence. He was a police officer who lost his life during the night. When her family called to tell her the news, it was late, and her cellphone was off. She didn't find out until the next day. From then on, she never turned her cellphone off. Her phone would light my dark room like a flare, screaming out various tones at full volume at three in the morning. I remember being annoyed and confused, wondering why she couldn't just turn the thing off, until I learned why. Each time the phone went off, it was a reminder. He was sustained in the sound and in the light.



I have had a very privileged life. I don't know too much about real loss and real pain. I don't know too much about minor loss or physical pain either. I've never been in a fight, and I've never even broken a bone. Despite it being abundantly clear that these things should obviously be avoided, it's hard not to be curious about such fundamental aspects of life. I wonder what a fight would feel like. I wonder how I'd react to a broken leg. And I even wonder about death.

The main character in Bennett Sims' extraordinary novel has a significant other and a best friend who have dealt with incredible loss. His girlfriend lost a father to cancer. His best friend's father is missing, and the search to find him is the spine of this novel. However, there is a unique circumstance in this book that is hard to ignore.

This is a world in the midst of a zombie epidemic.

Don't make the mistake that this is one of those books.

It's less about the world of the epidemic; it's more a relfection of how we adapt and move on, even under the most unbelievable circumstances. The zombie world presented is understated -- the worst outbreak of the undead has been contained, with life returning somewhat to normal, as the remaining loose zombies are rounded up unhurriedly. The narrator and his friend, Mazoch, are resigned to the fact that Mazoch's missing father has probably been bitten, and he is probably going to have to be put down or contained.

There is very little action in this book. It is not what you would typically expect from a book featuring the undead. Instead, Sims goes into brilliant philosophical observations about what it means to be between death and life, how the undead must think, what they can actually understand, and what compels them to do anything they do. The narrator is obsessed with understanding the undead state, eventually leading his girlfriend to wonder if he wishes he would be bitten himself, just to find out what it is like.

It is a wonderful, bizarre and surreal way to look at death - but that is exactly what Sims is doing. The undead are the memories of those we've lost, no longer alive, but not ready to die. Through our three main characters, we see how their past experiences shape what each one sees when they look at the reanimated corpses of what used to be people.

There are so many terrific observations on many different things, from dealing with memories, to moving on from loss, to living life and not getting caught up in trying too hard to understand. This is truly a very unique book full of insight, dealing with topics ranging from vast importance to lighthearted observations. Yes, it's written in a very David Foster Wallace-y way: the vocabulary is extensive, there are footnotes of digression, and attempts at understanding the Big questions on every page. And yes, it's easy to focus on the zombie aspects, as that is all the rage these days. But for me, it provided valuable insight on how to live with the "zombie" memories of loss - not to regard them with fear and anger, but to take them when you can get them. Even when the memory is ugly or frightening or sad, there is still a part of who you're missing in it, and that is something that should be cherished, not destroyed.

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

As another reviewer has pointed out, the big problem with this book is clear: how much distance is there between our narrator and our author? If there's plenty of distance, this is a pretty good satire of intellectualism, particularly that of contemporary academic philosophy. If there's no distance, this is awful, turgid self-congratulation.

But it's impossible to tell where Simms meant the book to fall on this spectrum. Towards the end there's a faint glimmer of hope that it's just been satire the whole way through. Our narrator's girlfriend suggests that he's spent so much time thinking about zombies; that he so wants to know, Nagel-style, what it's like to be a zombie, that he actually wants to become one. Allegory alert! Thinking too much about stuff makes it hard for you to step away from the subject matter.

But for most of the book, I felt that I was meant to take the narrator's ramblings quite straight-forwardly, either as "beautiful" Proustian investigations of memory when he's talking about the qualities of light and his girlfriend's hands etc...; or as "deep," Heideggerian investigations of everyday phenomena; or as "clear and precise" analytical animadversions on the epistemology of zombies. And since I've read Proust, and this is substandard by comparison, and I've read Heidegger, and know that Heidegger moved on from phenomenology towards a more transcendentalist understanding of his own project, and I know of the existence of analytic philosophy's 'zombie' discourse and the way it's used to investigate consciousness, I was left wondering why I wasn't just re-reading Proust, or Heidegger, or looking zombie philosophy up on wikipedia.

This could have been very interesting, I admit. Zombies are human beings who appear to be human but do not have any interiority, any intentionality, any conscious perceptions. They just drift hither and thither. In this book, they're propelled by memory. Nice little trick: are we just propelled by memory, too? Do we have anything that zombies lack? The conclusion to the book suggests that we do, inasmuch as the narrator makes a very conscious choice. He refuses to tell his friend about his father. They've been searching for Dad, who is a zombie. The narrator sees him, and doesn't report that sighting. Choice made. Not a zombie. He's ascended to humanity, even though his choice might look inhumane. How could you keep such a secret from your best friend?

That's a good short story.

This is not a short story, this is a novel. Did you dislike my use of the word 'animadversions' above? Did you wonder why I didn't just say 'conversations'? Because if you disliked that, boy, has this book got some pointlessly arcane vocabulary for you, that it refuses to put in any context that might actually help you learn the words. In fact, the only thing the book does not explain at great length is the meaning of these arcane words. It explains everything else over pages and pages and pages, like a champion mansplaining analytic philosopher, making sure you're *perfectly* clear on the point that one man's search for his father is paralleled by the other man's search for memory/humanity/etc... Pages.

The only thing here that I actually enjoyed thinking about is the relation between its content (described above) and its form, a horrible first person present tense narration that makes even less sense than present tense normally does. It's ugly to read. On the other hand, the present tense is also the zombie tense: no memory, no context, no telos (as our author would say); just aimless rambling. There might be something in that, but I will never know, because I'll never re-read this book.

I give two extra stars for the design. Very well done to Two Dollar Radio publishing. Then take away one of those stars for the ridiculous deckled edges.

[Yash Wadhwani · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m incredibly disappointed
by how I found out about this book.
I was trying to read novels written by
the alumni of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop -
The most prestigious writing program
in the world.

It's not popular.

You can’t buy it on Amazon.
You can't buy it from Kinokuniya.
Not without a significant delivery period.

The only way to get a quick copy is kindle.
Which worked out because
I highlighted so many parts.
The publisher thought
I was trying to pirate this book.

Don’t pirate this book.

I used to think that Arundhati Roy’s
The God of Small Things
was the pinnacle of great language.
This book supplants that.
By a wide margin.

Those of you who read for academic ambition
(i.e. I want a big brain)
there is no better language or sentence power
(from what I’ve read)
than Bennett Sims
A Questionable Shape.

The prose is delicious
I feel this ought to be requisite reading
at highschool.

I feel I was robbed.
I wasn’t made to read this
at a more developmental level.

And those of you who read
for the pleasure of the word -
Have you ever had Cheesecake?
After a really long time?
That first bite?
That’s the language of this book.

The only criticism I have is about the plot.
It doesn't grant too much exhilaration.
Although, an interesting premise:
This is a literary fiction zombie novel.

That’s like watching The Fast And The Furious
directed by Christopher Nolan.

Nevertheless,
the plot doesn't have too many fireworks.

It is however a prescient theme.
In this 2013 novel
the zombie apocalypse is normal.
Couples have arguments about going outside.
Sound familiar?

Read this special book.
It's beautiful. It churns your cerebrum.

And if I could give you a gift,
of something necessary,
something important,
I’d give you a reason to read
A Questionable Shape by Bennett Sims.

[Allie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Special Review: Allie's Dad Edition

This one requires a little background information. For Father's Day this year, I bought my dad a copy of this book. I bought myself a copy as well. The plan was to do a miniature father-daughter book club, in which we would both read the book and then talk about it.

When I picked up this novel, I didn't know how much it is a book about fathers. I knew very little about the plot of the book besides "there are zombies in it and it is written by Bennett Sims". I'd been avidly following Sims' excellent short fiction, so as soon as he had a novel out from Two Dollar Radio I knew that I was going to buy it. But this is a book about, among other things, reading, anxiety, relationship problems, and absent, possibly zombified fathers. So, good Father's Day choice!

I have some thoughts about the book. But I think it was more interesting to hear what my dad, who doesn't read much small press or experimental fiction, thought about it. My dad's reading background is that he read every science fiction book at the branch of the West Hartford library when he was a kid, and nowadays he reads The New Yorker on the train. Fiction-wise, he mostly reads mainstream literary novels. He is of the opinion that the stories in The New Yorker often aren't very good.

My dad liked this book. It was his first exposure to fiction that had a lot of theory in it / of it, so he enjoyed its density and cleverness. He was also fond of Sims' language, to the point where while reading the book he would occasionally stop to read lines out loud. My dad mentioned that his work colleagues were really surprised that he was reading a book about zombies, so he said, "This is a book about zombies like Moby-Dick is a book about a whale." Well put, dad!

We disagreed on the ending, which I thought was nice and ambiguous and my dad thought was non-ambiguous and unnecessary. My other critique is that this novel often feels like Bennet Sims doing his best impression of David Foster Wallace. There are many footnotes in this novel, but more tellingly it is the kind of narrative in which the protagonist must take every moment as a segue-way into a solipsistic tangent. Sims does this well, unlike some other DFW imitators, but I still would have appreciated a fresher voice. This is Sims' first novel, and my dad and I both thought it was great. I think that, as Sims becomes more confident in his own voice, his next novel will be even better.

My review: four stars.

My dad's review: five stars.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recensione: http://unantidotocontrolasolitudine.b...

[tree · Rating 1 out of 5]

i tried. but after the 10th footnote, on page 28, i just couldn't stand it anymore. i love footnotes! but this author does them a terrible injury. and who knew the zombie apocalypse would be so pretentious and dull? perhaps this novel contains Deep and Important Insights, but i'll just have to live without them as i can't be bothered to wade through the ponderous prose.

[Michael Seidlinger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Long after death, I will continue to shuffle lifelessly to the nearby coffee shop in a vacant, ultimately useless, attempt to wake up.

[Eric Lundgren · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a more thorough deconstruction of the zombie in recent lit, I refer you to Mark McGurl's excellent essay "Zombie Renaissance" in N+1.

Among the um, biting insights there: "When 'clockwork' characters show up in popular genre fiction, as they so often do, critics are apt to take them as an aesthetic offense to the human. It might be more accurate to say that our aesthetic displeasure in hackneyed types records our confrontation with a truth *about* the human we would rather deny, but which the zombie brings to the fore."

What do we make of this pensive, footnoted addition to the genre, then? I gather Bennett Sims's novel lurched groaning between editorial desks for a few years, making it a late arrival in the undead parade -- but that's publishing's bad, not the author's. The book has been served extremely well by Two Dollar Radio, with deckle edges and French flaps--enough said, right? My only quibble with the publishers is that the footnote numbering starts afresh on each page. All true footnote-fetishists must enjoy tracking their unruly accumulation.

(Sims's heavy use of footnotes is itself justified in a footnote: "The footnote is the typographic mark most emblematic of undeath ... [it] digs a grave in the text ... The words that are banished there are like thoughts that the text has repressed ... but they go on disturbing it from beneath.")

This novel definitely favors observation and meditation over plot, which can be summarized easily: Michael, the narrator, is helping his friend Matt Mazoch look for his father, who he fears has been zombified in the recent plague. Drawing on the well-known fact that zombies haunt the places that mattered to them most in life, Michael and Matt make daily rounds to a series of bleak locales around Baton Rouge, Louisiana: fast food restaurants, antique malls, and Mr. Mazoch's truly sad domicile.

Michael's devotion to his friend's quest is causing him some trouble at home with his girlfriend, Rachel, although it doesn't help that he makes her perform "defamiliarization exercises" as prescribed by *Fight the Bite!* (a sort of informational pamphlet distributed in the outbreak's aftermath - the narrator's aside on why he's been unable to read anything else is one of the novel's highlights). The couple also disagrees on how to navigate the zombie crisis, which has been largely contained. Rachel's approach is more sympathetic and rational-seeming, viewing the zombies as diseased victims unworthy of fear, while Michael succumbs to paranoia, agoraphobia, and an obsessive imagining of what actually being undead would be like.

What makes him a less than ideal partner also makes him a highly enjoyable, often brilliant narrator as he riffs on zombie resonances in everything from Heidegger to Hitchcock. As you would expect from a recent philosophy grad student, Michael is also formidably vocabbed: unless you're readily conversant with words like "eidetic" and "anamorphic," you may want to have a dictionary handy. These flourishes occasionally come off as a little heavy-handed, although admirers of Nabokov and Foster Wallace will likely forgive Sims his sins.

What I admire here is the seamless blurring of ordinary life and pulpy speculation. One indelible moment (among many in this book) has Michael suddenly frightened by the alternating signals at a pedestrian stoplight: the white walk signal atomizes to a series of glowing bulbs, then "an undead eye"; while the stop signal looks "flat and orange and still, like the bloody palm prints the infected leave." The low-level, subtle sense of dread that pervades the novel may be the result of the recent plague, or maybe it's just an eerie reflection of the way we live now, haunting our old sites, collecting things, but never quite remembering what those things or places meant to us.

Either way, Bennett Sims has written a stellar first novel for our "post-human" era.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

An overwritten mixed bag.

There's a lot of very interesting stuff here, mostly to do with how adroitly the author sees undead metaphors operative everywhere. (The movie analyses are especially interesting.) But this novel quickly wears out its welcome—for this reader, anyway. Why? Not because of the smothering lit-crit vocab that clutters just about every single sentence. Not because of the obsessive footnoting that makes any sort of straightforward progress through the novel difficult. (In fact, the footnotes are where some of the best writing occurs; the focusing constraints of the footnote as form make the author almost concise.) And not because nothing happens in terms of outward plot. No, what wore me down is that I never believed in the narrator as a person. He's just an excuse for a lot of overwrought, recursive meditation, none of which is convincing as that of a real person in this situation. He's just a device used to write about this stuff from a safe distance, and his voice never takes us anywhere. As a result, the novel is somewhat interesting without ever being hugely so, and after a while I just wanted out of the narrator's unconvincing head.

There are interesting aspects to this, though: the search of a son for his lost father; another character's grief about her own dead father; a truly new wrinkle on the undead and their behaviors as a literalization of nostalgia (itself a sort of reflexive longing for something that is dead and gone).

But mostly I am relieved to be done reading this. A long, long two-hundred-twenty pages.

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not your father’s zombie novel. Sims is an excellent writer and this oozes potential, But! If you are going to write a zombie novel, give me SOME action. Sims refuses. He opted to use the zombie hype train as an excuse to craft an exercise in philosophy. While it is at times profound and meaningful it is just as often ponderous and irritating. I pretty much hated the protagonist by the end of the novel, as well as his girlfriend. The high-browed moral debates just became too much to handle.

So, while I appreciate what Sims was going for here, and the writing is mostly excellent, I can’t give this more than 3 stars. Just ONE gory kill scene would have elevated this substantially. I mean, come on Bennet, those zombies were a real bore!

[Fat_tony · Rating 2 out of 5]

One hundred thousand analogies and ten billion smart observations and little thoughts and a million quips and five hundred billion witty little dialogues and zero times committing to a real plot event that would create a good story

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel that my two star rating deserves some explanation.

The main character in this book is a philosophy major/student, and therefore spends a lot of time philosophically ruminating on the changes that the undead infection has caused in his world.

That's all well and good, if you are into that sort of thing. My problem with it is that this sort of thing reminded me too much of the essays and readings that I had to do as an undergrad. I did not major in philosophy; I majored in film theory, which weirdly enough is basically the same thing.

This book has a lot of the character considering the quality of light in particular situations and also memories. There is also much thought given to the perspective/point of view of the undead. All you would have to do is add the phrase "the Undead Gaze" and this could be an extremely in-depth analysis of a zombie film.

Now here's the problem I have with that. Occasionally the ruminating went on for a little too long. There was too much analysis; the digressions went on for so long that I would forget where we had left off in the main story.
The character's asides were given in the form of footnotes - dense footnotes that are an essay unto themselves also gave me more undergrad flashbacks.
The author also clearly has a very expansive vocabulary. Sometimes too expansive. It sometimes felt that bigger words were used because they could be, not because they needed to be. (This however, may have been a conscious choice on the part of the author's, as the character may have felt the need to use large, philosophical/academic words.) This is another element that reminded me unfavorably of film theory essays.

So, if you like philosophical works, or don't mind the main character taking large digressions from the main story, you may enjoy this book. For me, however, it reminded me too much of an assigned reading than a book read for enjoyment.

[Holly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I want to label this something like "ontological fiction." It's a really smart meditation on what it might feel like to be "undead," and uses all these pop-cultural tropes that we're overly-familiar with (spreading viruses, zombies, public health emergencies, dead/undead/walking dead), but takes them to a melancholy realm. I think a lot of current stories using these tropes try to tap into the serious questions just by using death symbols - but often fail at it. This novel's zombies, by contrast, pointed beyond themselves (or something) to make me think about the deeper ontological questions. It's mordant (as in: critical; though I want to use that word because of the "mord").

Sims uses pomo and jargonistic (academic) language unabashedly, with copious footnotes and asides on things like: What might it feel like to be undead? Can the undead see and what does that mean? And a long passage on reading:

[… ] even if I earnestly considered shunting myself off the track of my reading and onto that of some more vigorous hobby … still I recognized that such a path was by now closed off to me. Windsailing while unread books lay in my apartment would only make me anxious, and, besides, could be postponed, I consoled myself, until once the reading was done. [...]
Was reading, as a worried professor once warned me it was, a race that I was always simultaneously winning and losing?

There is no real gore here, only psychic and emotional pain. A character obsessively searches for his father among the walking dead - a population of infected souls who are known to return to physical spots that held great meaning for them. Worth reading.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Startlingly good zombie fiction. It contains no horror (at least in the typical sense) and hardly any action, instead focusing on Nicholson Bakeresque footnote ruminations on various topics (the films of Tarkovsky, the subtly beautiful effect of light on stucco, what you actually see when you come back as an undead, etc). The undead are never really portrayed as scary or threatening, simply a fact of the world that these characters live in. The atmosphere and dialogue are top notch.

The plot is mainly concerned with a pair of survivors taking a road trip to see what happened to one of their fathers. It's interesting that the book talks about Solaris so much, as I actually found this book very reminiscent of another of Tarkovsky's films, Stalker. In Stalker, the closer the characters get to their prescribed goal, the more they seem to experience a feeling of horror and dread about what they might find when they get there. Highly recommended!

[Fede La Lettrice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sorprendente! Finge di essere un libro sugli zombie e su un'epidemia terribile che trasforma gli uomini in 'non morti', in realtà inizia quando tutto ciò è agli sgoccioli, l'epidemia domata, i contagiati sotto controllo, per parlare della vita e della morte e di come la mente umana la vive e la metabolizza. Una analisi profonda e condivisibile del sentire, una riflessione che coinvolge su argomenti fondamentali come la famiglia e l'amore. Soprattutto un romanzo sulla vita.

Quella luce negli occhi
Bennett Sims
Traduzione: Sara Reggiani
Editore: Edizioni Clichy, collana Black Coffee
Pag: 273
Voto: 4/5

[Whitney Maas · Rating 2 out of 5]

The actual content of this book held very interesting reflections interwoven into it's zombie setting, but the extensive use of "footnotes" drove me absolutely insane and by the end I was ready to throw it across the room. The footnotes extended into the next page while also sometimes taking up a whole page... the flipping around while in the middle of a sentence on the previous page became frustrating and just irksome. *sigh*

[Jack D]

How fitting that a book philosophizing on the past/place/memory is also set in my hometown and is also also set in the same places I used to haunt (Highland Park, the Rave theater, Louie’s). Should be a Perfect fit! As much as I liked this, it didn’t sail home for me, though. I’m (unfortunately) a sucker for the sort of pretentious, bloated, philosophizing novel-of-ideas this is maybe inspired by. But the philosophizing didn’t totally land. Not bad, just not really the sort of deep-diving existential crisis-ing my brain does.

Also, I found the scenic descriptions reeeeally lacking. For example, I know what Denham Springs looks like bc I’ve been there, but the novel doesn’t do much work to sketch out the scenes/characters beyond their Big Ideas. Does “Denham Springs antique mall” have any descriptive bearing to readers who haven’t actually been there? Places like that are fascinating in lots of banal & strange ways. Knowing that, I just wish we would linger on the descriptions so the reader gets a sense of the humid gray world of metro BR.

I feel like this review makes it sound like I hated it. I definitely didn’t hate it! I quite liked it & would love to read more from Sims & am gonna stop rambling now. Final thought: very relatable to my experience in BR that the only things to do are: 1. Drive 2. Sit in various parks 3. Watch movies 4. Think about asinine shit very Seriously.

[Doug O'Connor · Rating 4 out of 5]

DOUG O’CONNOR
BOOK REVIEW: Bennett Sims - A Questionable Shape

“Brains! More brains!” is a famous line from the 80’s horror-comedy movie Return of the Living Dead. The zombie--affectionately referred to by some social media types as “Oil Drum Guy” because of the greasy, can-like face and rotting slack jaw--is in the midst of feeding on a corpse when he spins around to spit out his line. Puffy-haired teenagers scramble upstairs in fear. One girl’s butt cheeks jiggle gratuitously with each step climbed. The effect is so crass it’s funny (for some).

For those strictly interested in Return of the Living Dead-esque straight-up zombie gorging spiced with apocalyptic silliness, please move on: we barely encounter a single zombie in this novel (the word is actually ‘undead;’ let’s be exact here). Bennett Sims’ A Questionable Shape digs beneath the mephitic epidermis of your average zombie plight and engages in an epistemological and moral debate over what it might mean to be undead. There is not one feed. Not one close-up. Not one hack and slash. Well, maybe just one feed.

I make it sound as though I am disappointed.

A Questionable Shape was selected to receive the Bard Fiction Prize in 2014, and is an impressive debut. Some background on the author: Bennett Sims was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and has studied at Pomona College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received a Provost Fellowship and a Michener-Copernicus Award after graduating.

The novel’s plot? Easy: the narrator’s former graduate school friend, Matt, is on a self-anointed search for his father, whom has disappeared. The narrator accompanies Matt during these searches in which they visit and revisit the significant places Matt believes his father might stumble off to as an undead (if he were bitten). Why would the father do that? The narrative gives his take in the opening line: “What we know about the undead so far is this: they return to the familiar...no one knows why they do it...it is as if the undead are capable of ‘homing’ in this way.” Matt has given himself three weeks to find his father--just enough time before hurricane season plows through and washes the undead away and possibly infect the water supply. The novel's action takes place during the final week of the search, Matt becoming more and more desperate to find his lost father.

To some extent, the hopeless search for a lost zombie father might hold emotional mustard as a plot--but Sims isn’t that interested in “what happens.” The narrator, one Vermaelen, doesn’t squander his time informing us of the blow-by-blow scenario: he is more interested in investigating the philosophical origins of what it means to be an undead: “We can’t be sure what the undead are experiencing is misery.” Can one know what it feels like to be a zombie? To feel the acerebral tractor beam towards vaguely familiar spaces and play eat-the-intestines from anything living you see--and be sad about it? Zombies experiencing misery. Interesting.

In one scene, near the end of the search, Matt, the narrator and his wife have a nice orange curry dinner with sliced potatoes and salad. Soon a debate ensues. Matt believes the undead should be “burned or buried.” Rachel thinks the undead should have legal rights--or cured.

Rachel: “Why not be patient, wait for a cure?”
Matt: “Because there’s no cure for death!”
Rachel insists: “You’re talking about genocide.”
Matt: But these are “contagious cannibals.”
Rachel: “We have no reason to believe they can’t be domesticated.”

The dinner devolves into this risible debate over zombie rights. The narrator attempts to play the middleman: “the undead occupy a ‘zone of indistinction,’ a cloudy biological interstice, and it would be all too easy to dehumanize them justifying anything from forced labor to genocide. Even if you reject the term ‘genocide,’ you’re still talking about extinction. You’d be wiping out a new life form less than a year of its existence.” He goes on in his footnote about the loss of zombie, er, human rights. While the debate on the surface seems serious, the underlying tone of the narration is hyperbole. And that’s where this novel shines: in its hidden humor, its utter ridiculous premise cloaked in grandiloquent academic sincerity.

While the narrator loves to speculate(most of his ruminations are performed in the conditional tense, or prefaced by the verb “imagine.”), over time, as these conditionals and imaginings aggregate, we see him becoming increasingly paranoid and at the same time desperate for knowledge: “Sometimes I think what you really want...is to be infected yourself…just so you can see what it’s like” and “I look at her again, trying to see her as my undead body would." Most of these ruminations are hard not to interpret as tongue-in-cheek.

And that’s the secret of this book: it’s funny. Not funny har-har backslap-your-drinking-buddy-har-har, but layered with peculiar lofty allusions and off-key juxtapositions of words and one-liner zombiisms that make you wonder if Sims isn’t taking the piss on some haughty slice of academia and its relentless analyses of everything. There are one-liners: “I’m not going to order a dish of infected food for myself. With a side of infection.” There are the Wallace-esque footnotes riddled with wordplay and quixotic metaphors: “Sometimes I wonder whether we, the living, are constantly generating the magnetoreceptive memory pellets that will guide us in undead...mineral flecks of nostalgic energy…[and] over the course of a lifetime, these might accrete and calcify into little lodestones in our minds: geospatial anamnestic kernels.”

One could imagine fewer of these one-liners and footnotes lending comic relief to an overarching seriousness (not that his brand of humor isn’t serious), but their repeated usage suggests that Sims is having more fun with his subject than at first glance. And, like a “magnetoreceptive” something, this book attracts. He might have you scurrying to dictionary.com every two sentences, but it’s worth the search.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bennett Sims is a true, pathological talent. This “zombie book that’s not really about the zombies” pushes the limits of that sub-genre to its breaking point in a way that is, after ingesting all of this in one sitting, as heartbreaking as it is technically impressive. A real feat that a book this agonizingly solipsistic can also feel this enjoyable, sympathetic and not insufferable. Sure, there are moments where it gets close. The footnotes are maddening. But then in them is also the contradiction of the reading experience of this author generally: On the one hand stupefying (so many pathways of digressive associative meaning, it’s like turning over a page and savoring the victory only to find a third, longer side) and on the other hand miraculous (how is this even possible?) and on the third hand — he just drops something like that “Shiva’s worth of hands” line exactly in this scenario — where it is so hilarious, so relatable, so deliciously self-aware in its absurdity and its obsession to pursue it to its logical conclusion… It just becomes endearing enough to me that I involuntarily break out in a big stupid grin and am literally shaking my head or slapping my knee, and I find myself trying to make eye contact with passersby just to have someone to share this with and marvel at together, like, can you believe this? And then turn back and devour every single word.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read through this book in two days when normally it takes me at least a week to read a novel. I was completely drawn in and for that reason, I liked this book. The plot was simple, but effective and had me wanting to know where the book would lead in the end. I kept thinking, "What's the final message?" Wanting to know the answer is what led me to finish the book quickly.

I’m not able to rate this book higher than “liked it” because I didn’t enjoy being inside the mind of the narrator. Some of his thoughts came across as really honest, but a lot of times came across as just too much, for lack of better words.

There are some funny, relatable quotes such as,

In a manner of speaking, my only goal in reading was to outlive my to-read list, to finish it before time and mortality finished me.

And some of the (constant) metaphors are genuinely interesting. His metaphor for the never-ending reading list was that it was

the childhood futility of trying to dig a hole in the beach, how the sand always spills back in faster than you can trowel it out.

But then, you get a lot of thoughts, that for me personally, were difficult to read one after the other. Just flipping open to a random page, this is what I found.
Describing the Mississippi bridge, the narrator states

[I]ts great latticework of girders is gridded against the southern horizon like a waffle iron, filled with blue sky as will batter.

And further along in the same paragraph you get,

The line of vapor has silvered brilliantly from within, and the jet, itself glinting like a knife tip, seems to be cutting into the sky to reveal it, carving a gash for this bright light to seep through. Like an incision being made in a lit lampshade.

Despite disliking the narrator as a character, I did enjoy the way the author discussed mourning and understanding oneself. The author successfully inspires introspection. I usually don’t think about qualities inherent to myself in relation to place. What places are important to me? What do those places say about me as a person? And of course, places hold memories of people that were in those places. So, which people in my life have strongly contributed to who I am?

In addition to these questions, there was one part that emotionally affected me. Surprisingly, it was a part about the narrator’s relationship. While the relationship mostly resulted in “this is ridiculous” sighs, i.e. defamiliarization excercises, one thought hit me out of nowhere.

The reason she's even sharing that memory to begin with is that she wants me, as her lover, to know that about her. The reason she's even sharing that memory to begin with is that I couldn't properly love her-couldn't know her as my beloved- without first having incorporated it into my own personal sense of who she is. The subtext of any memory that a lover shares is, "I want you, my lover, to know this about me, because this is the facet of myself I want you to love."

I found this as extremely poignant and a relative "truth" in my own life.

Although I won’t be reading the book again, I would still recommend it to friends. Just as the point above meant something to me, I can see this book uniquely affecting different individuals.

After thought: I thought the footnotes would bother me, but I actually got used to them and didn’t find them to take away from the book at all.

[Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

I generally do not enjoy zombie novels and read very few. This is one of two exceptions, though, with the other being Max Brooks' World War Z. The main reason I like both, a lot, is that they are shaped by the legacy of David Foster Wallace. WWZ is done in the style of DFW's Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, and has a certain, though not exact, "DFW smartness."

Bennett Sims was a student of DFW and it shows in this book. He writes with a good bit of Dave's hyperconsciousness, is unafraid of philosophical issues and handles them well (a philosophy graduate, if I remember correctly), and throws in a few Wallcean-style words here and there (not the grammatical wonder that most of Dave's works are, but you do have to work some to get everything out of this one, which is as it should be and is certainly consistent with what DFW expected). I like the way he handles the question of "what is it like to be a zombie?" I also like the way the supposedly clever narrator turns out being an idiot in disguise, given plenty of opportunity to see that throughout, and yet never really gets that he's just a regular joe. I suspect that is Mr. Sims' way of reminding us that every member of our species does a splendid job of living inside its own head, and not a very good job of seeing ourselves from outside our heads, as others see us.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

As with most good books about the zombie apocalypse, the focus here is not on the zombies. It's on the impact the outbreak has on the survivors. An interesting twist here is that the rights of the zombies as still somewhat alive, or at least not entirely dead, are to be respected. So, instead of an all-out bloodbath and zombie slaughter, the infected are rounded up and quarantined. This sense of the grayness of what a zombie is helps contribute to questions about who we are too. That part of the narrative, informed by any variety of recent philosophical and postmodern theorists, leads to interesting interactions about what it means to be alive, what it means to know others, and what it means to know your self.

It took me a while to get into the flow of the novel, but once I did, I was hooked. Now I can see myself, at some point, re-reading it so that I can catch things I missed the first time through. I'd give it 4.5 stars if I could, but I'm averaging up because, by the end, it convinced me I should.

[Karen Carlson · Rating 5 out of 5]

How the hell am I supposed to intelligently write about a zombie novel that references Wittgenstein, Kobayashi Issa, Thomas Hardy, Hans Holbein the Younger, and Alfred Hitchcock (not to mention Hamlet via the title)? A book that’s dedicated to David Foster Wallace and borrows from Nicholas Baker? That sees analogues to the undead in, among other things, chess, art, footnotes, and the green power light on a speaker? That wrings more out of the flashing “Walk/Don’t Walk” street signs than some books get out of a multigenerational war saga? A zombie novel where subjects like memory, perception, reality, being, and knowing are far more prevalent than actual zombies?

Well, I can't, but I can enthuse. It's the zombie novel for people who sneer at zombie novels. Details blogged at A Just Recompense.

[Sarah Parkin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have complicated feelings on this one. It's a great story that the reader struggles to access because it's filtered through one of the least enjoyable narrators I've ever read.

I'm still trying to work out whether the style is a satire of that one white male philosophy student many will recognise from university. If so, then it sort of works, except that it became so irritating rather than entertaining that I put the book down and walked away from it more than once. If it's not, this novel adopts the writing style of an insufferable, verbose prick for the sake of it. Either way, it took me out of the narrative completely.

When it gets out of its own way, it's actually pretty enjoyable and you can engage more with the interesting intellectual points the novel tries to explore. The last chapter almost made me reassess the whole thing. Unfortunately, then I remembered that in the previous chapter I'd skipped a half-page footnote about Agamben.

[Nicholas Binge · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book. If you're looking for a zombie apocalypse story that isn't really a zombie story, but a deep and highly academic exploration of the nature of obsession, friendship and consciousness, then this is the book for you. It is not action, pacey, exciting or thrilling, at least not in a traditional sense. The narrative drifts off on long academic tangents. The footnotes spill over onto multiple pages. There are pages that are merely ruminations on traffic lights. If you like that sort of thing, this was a beautifully written book. If you find that sort of thing pretentious (and it IS a little pretentious), then it probably isn't.

[Trent Darcey Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

It starts off as, dare I say it, a beautiful zombie book. Simms’s descriptions are of lovely imagery. His patented footnote style is explained and utilized well as he describes the footnotes themselves as the undead text living beneath the surface. For much of the book he manages to make a zombie apocalypse work as an exploration of what makes life meaningful. Then, about 2/3rds of the way through, he loses cohesion. The last section of the book is meandering and unsatisfying. Maybe this is why his career begins to focus heavily on short stories.