The Girl with All the Gifts

Jon billed this to me as a combination of Matilda, a zombie film and Never Let Me Go. Honestly, that's pretty spot on: there's a first part that is basically a zombie in the Matilda-genre, followed by a longer second part of Matilda in the zombie genre.

The whole idea is a really unique take on the zombie genre, and Carey does a great job using a lot of the old standbys of survival horror to set the scene where he can, allowing most of the prose to really focus in on the protagonists. Using an ensemble cast really allows the idea of zombie sentience to sign – without the point-of-view of Melanie, a lot of what happens in the book would lose its ethical greyness, but without the point-of-view of the humans, the survival drive would not be felt as well, either. The five characters and their relationships between each other really complement each other nicely. By using zombies, rather than a brand new concept of some sort, Carey frees up a lot of time to focus on the existential (or as he calls them, ontological) ideas of the novel: what makes a being a person, what is free will, what people owe to humanity.

Finally, the science, as far as I could tell (not being a mycologist) was very nicely done. It's rare to find science fiction that actually hits science and is simultaneously interesting. I don't think that using Ophiocordyceps isn't a unique idea (I assume – given that Ophiocordyceps species that actually exist are already called “Zombie Fungus”; I don't actually do zombie usually) but the details that Carey adds, were interesting, plausible, and added to the plot. My one nitpick is regarding the final piece: that vertical transmission of Ophiocordyceps results in children who are neurologically intact was something I'd guessed from about 25% of the way in, if not sooner, so I don't really think discovering it justifies dissecting children. Caldwell was depicted as a brilliant scientist, who only did the necessary harm, but that really fell flat for me at the end. Yes, it was just a hypothesis, but her dissection didn't really expand beyond the hypothesis in any way, and an MRI of Melanie's brain would have been just as good.