Even bearing in mind the customary Spoiler Policy of this magazine, I feel compelled to alert you to the MAJOR SPOILERS herein for the first book in The Newsflesh Trilogy, the Hugo-nominated Feed. It would be impossible to discuss this latest book without referencing a major, brilliantly shocking event from the one preceding it, and so if you have yet to read Feed I urge you to do so, unspoiled if you can manage it, before assaying this review. (Or if you need further convincing, go and check out my review of Feed in last issue, and then go out and read it, and then come back and read this.)

You have been warned.

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First of all, I have an unpleasant duty to perform. None of us likes to utter these words, if we’re honest, and yet it is entirely necessary that I confess my inadequacy right off the bat, so that we can move on.

I was wrong.

Oh, look, I wasn’t completely wrong. When, in my review of Feed last month, I said that I thought it was the best genre book of last year, I wasn’t wrong. When I described our heroine, Georgia Mason, as “spectacular” and said that the ending of that book “INCREDIBLE!”, I wasn’t wrong either.

But when I said that Georgia’s oft-expressed devotion to her adoptive brother Shaun wasn’t in a “Jaime/Cersei” way… yeah, I was wrong there. Way wrong. It was totally in a Jaime/Cersei way! And… well, I think I’m okay with it. At least as okay as everyone else in the book was, anyway.

(They’re not really related, you know. Just raised that way. So… yeah. We’re good.)

Now, with the shock death of Georgia at the end of Feed, despite the fact that she was our first person narrator (see, I told you: MAJOR SPOILERS), Shaun takes over recounting duties for Deadline, and his is a pretty entertaining head in which to spend our time. He is running, with the help of a dedicated bunch of other bloggers, After the End Times, the site he and his sister started, and which rose to prominence due to their selection as official bloggers to presidential hopeful, Senator Ryman. The now-President Ryman has taken as his VP (after the disgrace of his running mate in the last outing, who was using the zombie virus as a weapon – again, see, MAJOR SPOILERS!), former Mason helpmeet Rick Cousins, and so at the kickoff, things seem to be going pretty well for our guy, at least professionally. Ratings are high, he has access to the most powerful people in the land, and his staff have taken up the slack left flailing upon the untimely death of George – who was, let’s face it, the true brains behind the operation.

But, wait! George is still with us, in the form of thoughts in Shaun’s head. Either’s he’s gone nuts or her consciousness is actually there… or he’s being haunted, another possibility since he sees her apparition every now and then. Or it may just be a serious case of PTSD. But he’s so convinced she’s there he even drinks gallons of the Coke to which she was addicted in life, and which he himself abhors, keeping his coffee habit to a minimum in deference to her tastes. In his head. He’s also prone to sudden bursts of violence (of which his employees are surprisingly tolerant, just as they are of the little voice inside his head to which he frequently speaks aloud).

Oh, yeah; Shaun’s totally fine.

We also hear from George in her many posthumous blog postings, culled from her secret files, and almost all of which center on Shaun and the awesomeness and loveableness thereof. (Okay, it’s a little bit weird that they keep referring to each other as brother and sister. But, no. Ours is not to judge. Not related, not related…)

Wait, let me go back to the zombies.

I know you already knew this was a zombie series, since clearly you had ALREADY READ FEED before beginning on this discussion of Deadline, right? Right? But this is a zombie series with a twist… because not only has society managed to soldier on after the dead rose (with the help of a judicious dose of zombie lore culled from George Romero movies), but there are still enough functioning services -- communications, scientific research, and the like -- to ensure that a massive worldwide conspiracy of mass killing can be conducted with relative impunity by a seemingly ruthless cabal. A conspiracy, of course, into which Shaun and his cohorts are inexorably drawn. And what does all of this have to do with Georgia’s death? Something, that’s for damn sure!

Now, I think that is enough of those pesky spoilers to be going on with, so I won’t say another thing about this book except that it is TREMENDOUS, a worthy successor indeed to its progenitor, and offers up yet another shock ending that I would never have seen coming. NEVER.

The third book in the trilogy, Blackout, can not arrive fast enough for my liking.

If you’ve yet to give Mira Grant’s Newsflesh books a try, then I just don’t understand what you’re waiting for. An actual zombie apocalypse? ‘Cause then we’ll all be using them as survival guides. But in the meantime, it never hurts to be a little ahead of the game… and be massively, almost convulsively, entertained, moved and astounded in the process.

Yes, even with the sibling... er, emphatically not-sibling... stuff.

Say it with me: not related, not related...

   -- Rachel Hyland