August 16, 2004
Exeunt Zombies
Today my friend Dave concludes Monster Island, a serial novel that features a sentient zombie, an all-girl Somali army, Scottish mummies, taxis mired in putrescent flesh, and actual NYC landmarks. I personally guarantee you that it is more enthalling than Dave Egger’s similar efforts at Salon, because unlike Eggers, Wellington understands that the first rule of serialization is the constant cliffhanger. He also knows that if it can’t be said with zombies, it is probably not worth saying.
Those of you who have been keeping up with the story know that Dave is a fantastically inventive writer who can crank out novels like most people crank out emails, but if you haven’t been keeping up, you’re missing passages like this:
The bodies arched and heaved, backs curling, heads pushed down by feet looking for purchase. A thousand moving corpses strained with their arms and legs, pushing each other upward, the limbs of the ones on the bottom snapping like dry sticks. The one on top, an Asian girl in a pair of blood-stained pink Sanryo overalls, reached up with one hand and touched the coping of the planetarium’s roof. A Somali girl with a bayonet on the end of her rifle lunged forward and impaled the dead girl’s head like a pineapple. When the bayonet retracted the Asian girl rolled down the side of the undead human pyramid to smack the asphalt of Central Park West. A man in an Armani suit with one leg hanging in tatters slumped forward to take her place. One of the Somalis opened up with a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on a tripod and his body erupted in chunks of rotten meat that pelted the bodies below like foul rain.
Now that’s writin’, and brokenype is honored by our association with it.
I do hope you will join me in congratulating Dave on the completion of his novel.
If you’re new to the story, start here.
