But I do think that the reaction of other people to Shaun’s reaction to Georgia’s death is unrealistic (at best). I’m not a psychologist, so I won’t pretend to understand how people react to death of loved ones and deal with grief. Speaking of unnecessary, let’s talk about Shaun for a moment. So Deadline is fast-paced, but a lot of those pages are boring and somewhat unnecessary. Instead, the team has to go to some kind of nefarious research facility to hear the same thing, only this time from someone in a lab coat. And then when they do have a discussion, it seldom advances the plot or provides much new knowledge. It seems like every time someone has something important, perhaps even life-saving, to say, they decide it would be better to sleep, or eat, or do something else and defer the conversation for the morning. The plot is convoluted owing in no small part to the fact that everyone in this book sucks at communicating.

I’ll hand it to Mira Grant: Deadline is definitely action-packed and fast-paced, though for every “action-packed” scene, I suppose there is an accompanying scene of painfully slow dialogue and exposition as everyone stuffs more wads of cotton into their ears. However, its plot and characterization fall into the same old traps-and this time, the zombie honeymoon is over. Deadline, in my opinion, improves upon the pacing and structure of Feed quite a bit. It had an interesting take on zombies and bloggers but was hobbled by less-than-stellar plot. I don’t remember exactly how I felt about Feed after reading it, but I think I liked it but did not see it as a remarkable, Hugo-winning book. I particularly agree about the lack of actual zombie combat. If you want a non-spoilery review, check out Kemper’s well-articulated reasons for this book’s mediocrity. From here on out, we will be knee deep in zombie guts and spoilers. So that spoiler flag I put on here? Don’t ignore that if you were thinking I was kidding. I’ve decided that everything I want to discuss about this book takes me into hella spoilers territory. Another Newsflesh novel nominated for a Hugo.

So here we are again, almost one year later.

Feed by Mira Grant