‘Pariah’ – Bob Fingerman (Tor)

I haven’t read an awful lot over the last couple of months (well, nowhere near what I’d normally expect to get through) but I did manage to read a few books and while I try and finally finish ‘Into the Narrowdark’, I thought I’d post my thoughts on those books here.

And one of those books was ‘Pariah’, a book that I remembered thoroughly enjoying back in 2010 but somehow, hadn’t gone back to in the intervening years. I was struggling to settle on anything and if you know me, you’ll know that ‘zombie horror’ is a sure fire way of holding my attention so the choice pretty much made itself.

So in I dived and… I’ll be honest, there’s still a lot to like about ‘Pariah’ but either I wasn’t quite in the mood for it or the book has lost a little something over the years. I’m not sure, let me see if I can explain.

A global plague has nearly vanquished mankind; the citizenry of New York City is no exception.

Eight million zombies. Should to shoulder. Walking the streets, looking for their next meal of human flesh. The residents of an Upper East Side walk-up have joined forces to protect themselves, the pageant of walking rot outside their windows a constant reminder of their foreseeable fate. Trapped in the safety of their building, the tenants find themselves at each others throats. When they see a lone teenage girl who walks unharmed among the undead, everything changes.

I’m not going to go too much into what I liked about this book, not here. Instead, I’ll point you at a review that I wrote just over fourteen years ago (and don’t I feel old for saying that), Here It Is. What I’ll say here is that a lot of what I liked about ‘Pariah’ last time round, was still there to enjoy within the book. Fingerman paints an appropriately grim picture of the last throes of the zombie apocalypse, then turns it all on its head with an intriguing twist that even now, kept me reading. In that respect, I’m glad that I picked ‘Pariah’ up for a re-read.

That being the case then, why did it feel like a real struggle to finish it? Because as much as I enjoyed ‘Pariah’, it took me about two or three weeks to finish, compared to a few days the last time around.

I’ve thought about this and yeah, some of that was on me. It’s not always a books fault if I can’t finish it and I wasn’t in the best place to get all comfortable and read.

It was a little more than that and possibly a backhanded compliment, of sorts, at how well Fingerman handled his subject matter here. You see…

A zombie apocalypse can be really boring.

Seriously, stick with me. It’s one thing fighting zombies or running away from them, there’s plenty going on there. But what happens after you find shelter and make it so the zombies can’t get in? What do you do next? And how can you move things forward (if at all) when the undead outnumber you literally millions to one? You can’t, all you can do is keep on trying to live each day and when you’re stuck in an apartment block, with barely any food left, the day to day is going to get very dull, very quickly.

Romero showed us this in ‘Dawn of the Dead’, to good effect, but Fingerman doesn’t quite have the cast to pull it off it, as well, here. It felt like there was a lot of apathy here and a lot of inner monologue that went nowhere. And that’s fine, given what the cast are facing. It was just that this time round, it felt like Fingerman had done it a little too well, leaving me in no doubt as to the mental state of the survivors but not giving me much to get invested in as a result. This did change a little, with the introduction of Mona, and the finale was worth it; it was just a hard old slog to make it that far.

I hope that made a little sense, it feels like ages since I’ve written a book post :o) ‘Pariah’ is still a worthwhile read but if my experience was anything to go by, a book that you have to be in a particular mood to read, if you are going to get anything out of it.

And if you're so inclined, have a click Here to see my thoughts on 'Winters Dregs', where it all began...