Dead Sea
by Brian Keene

Published by Leisure Fiction/Dorechester Publishing
337 pages
August 2007
Paperback
ISBN: 978-0-8439-5860-7

No one does action like Brian Keene; but what's really amazing is how he infuses his action with so many ideas . Through several novels, Keene has made the zombie genre his own with taut escape sequences and thrilling fights for survival. In the zombie novels and others (such as The Conqueror Worms ), Keene has also constructed an intricate mythos, much as HP Lovecraft did, adapting Biblical and pre-Biblical mythologies to describe a hostile and chaotic universe bubbling just beneath the fragile crust of our reality. In his most recent novel, Dead Sea , Keene once again strides into the zombie genre, but this work is most distinctly not a sequel to his earlier works. Dead Sea is a stand-alone story that does not make use of his signature mythos. Instead Keene explores his characters roles within the “monomyth,” the common story at the heart of all myths.

The term “monomyth” was coined by scholar Joseph Campbell. Looking at mythologies all over the world, Campbell found a common story of a hero who must journey into great peril to bring back a boon, possibly a magic object or just his own increased knowledge gained through adversity, which can be used to heal whatever ails his society, be it a dragon, a famine, or a zombie plague. While Keene makes reference to Campbell and his theories in Dead Sea , the myth is not accepted at face value but is instead questioned, dissected, and challenged as to its relevance in a 21 st century world. Myths are just stories where society stores its answers to life's deepest questions: why are we here? How do we live? What does life mean? But when life has changed so rapidly that there are no commonly accepted answers to such questions, what value do myths retain? And when there is no human society left for a hero to bring a boon back to, why go through the journey at all?

In Dead Sea the hero in question is Lamar Reed, a working class, gay black man living in Baltimore – not the standard protagonist for a horror novel but not unusual for Keene who has an admirable knack for breaking with tradition. Lamar is also a man with a past. Having been laid-off from his assembly line job at a Ford plant, Lamar has robbed a Ford dealership in a mixture of revenge and financial necessity. So he is already a fugitive, living alone with his guilt, when the zombie plague hits and imprisons him even more surely in his home. The plague follows what might be called the Romero model of infection: zombification is caused by a germ or virus that can be passed by bites or other transference of bodily fluids, mainly blood, causing sickness, death, and reanimation in the victim who then develops an insatiable need to attack and devour its fellow humans. Keene 's primary innovation – used in some of his previous works as well – is that the plague can jump species (as actual viruses do, from avian flu to Ebola). So the plague in Dead Sea begins with dead rats crawling from sewers in New York to attack rush hour commuters. As Lamar watches reports on his TV, the world falls apart with infected humans turning on one another and the progress of the virus through different species making sanctuary nearly impossible to find. Zombie coyotes rip apart a mother and her baby. Household pets, like dogs and cats, become infected. The last image Lamar sees on TV before the power goes out for good is “grainy footage of a million zombie rats swarming over a million humans in Mumbai , India .” Keene 's verbal skill is so great that his words on the page easily match the power of filmic images in the best zombie movies.

Alone in his house with zombies roaming outside, Lamar deals with thoughts of suicide, not for the last time in the novel. In fact most of the characters try to figure out why they are fighting to survive at all when there is no hope of things getting better. The world has become hostile to life itself. Often in the post-apocalypse genre, survivors are like American Adams, left with the task of rebuilding a better world. Indeed, Lamar is well aware that his past crime has been expunged by the plague and that blood has washed him clean of his sins. But he cannot raise enough hope in himself to leave his house and seek other survivors. It is the urgency of a fire sweeping through Baltimore that finally drives him – as well as other survivors and masses of zombies – toward the shore, where he decides he can seek the safe harbor of the open sea in a boat.

Keene 's writing is at its most crisp and thrilling as he describes Lamar running the gauntlet of lurching, rotting creatures while simultaneously trying to outrace the rapidly advancing fires. In Keene 's earlier zombie novel The Rising , he perfected the motif of writing his characters into impossible traps and then saving them at the last second. He uses the technique to good effect here, with Lamar saved from a group of zombies by shotgun-wielding children, Tasha and Malik Roberts. Then the three of them must in turn be saved when they are trapped atop an SUV by a zombie dog pack. Mitch Bollinger, a biker and non-believing bible salesman whose real passion is guns, helps them shoot their way to the wharf. There, with a mass of zombies and a burning city closing in around them, they jump aboard the Spratling , a US Coast Guard cutter whose captain had already decided to set out to sea with a few survivors.

In Keene 's novels, the strong relationships between characters often offset the bleakness of their situation. Family ties, or more often ties within a surrogate family of survivors, provide a reason to survive and a basis for ethical behavior. In Tasha and Malik, Lamar has a surrogate family thrust upon him. The other people on the Spratling assume he is their father, and by default he must play that role. But he resists it. He takes care of the children, but he resists the role of father and hero. He remains unconvinced that there is a reason to go on living. And thematically the novel does not posit love or family as an adequate answer to the question of how to live in a world hostile to life.

From the medieval “ship of fools” to the Pequod in Moby Dick , ships and their passengers and crew have served as literary microcosms of society. The zombie genre itself functions most often as social and political criticism; Romero has used the containment of a house, a mall, and an underground military base as laboratories to examine human behavior and psychology. And most often Romero shows that the survivors – human society – are more dangerous to each other than the zombies are. So in selecting a small ship as his novel's primary setting, Keene has found the perfect device, or one could say literary cliché, with which to examine humanity's penchant for self-destruction. There are some indications that he will go in that direction: some passengers are bigots who sow strife, some are cowards who threaten others' safety, and one is a cop whose brutality and hunger for power make him likely to sacrifice other passengers. But Keene does not follow this well-worn path and instead chooses a different tack (no pun intended). Instead of being a pressure cooker of social forces, the ship and the isolation at sea turn the characters inward to ruminate on the meaning, or lack thereof, of their continued existence. Lamar in particular faces an existential crisis.

The relative safety of the ship does not provide a long break in the action. Since the Spratling had really been a museum piece docked in the harbor, it lacks adequate food and fuel, so the survivors must soon find a port where they can re-supply. They send a small group ashore at Coast Guard station near Virginia Beach . They think they have found a pretty good haul of supplies with no zombie trouble until they make a horrifyingly macabre discovery: a field of crucified zombies, moaning, writhing, and rotting in the sun. Even worse, they learn that the people were not zombies when they were crucified. The nightmare is the work of an insane reverend who has been force-feeding the blood and flesh of zombies to living people in order to “resurrect” them. In his madness, the reverend thinks he has acquired the power of Christ to bring back the dead with his bizarre communion. Earlier in the novel, Lamar had discussed his contempt for preachers who had ignored the problems of the ghetto and condemned him for his sexuality. Mitch had professed his lack of belief in a god despite being a Bible salesman. In fact, he says that the hypocrisy and fanaticism of Christian leaders only made selling Bibles harder. For these characters, there is no meaning to be found in traditional religion. It is just another delusion people use to hide from that fact that there is no ultimate order or meaning in the universe. In dealing with the reverend, the survivors attract the attention of mobs of zombies and must quickly retreat back to their ship without the crucial supplies.

So the survivors are forced to return to the sea without hope of finding a safe port ever again. The phrase “return to the sea” has evolutionary (or devolutionary) overtones to it, and it is as if the world is turning backwards, becoming hostile to all life. Lamar and the others once again ask themselves, if there is no place for life on the planet, can there be any reason to struggle on? The zombie virus of the novel may echo the real effects on planetary life of global warming, genetic modifications, or AIDS. If the world evolves – or is damaged by us – to the point where we no longer have a place in the ecosystem, where do we find meaning? The novel examines, and discards, religion, society, and the family as sources of meaning in the face of a chaotic universe. Even the monomyth, the primal granddaddy of adventure tales, no longer provides a valid reason to act or fight for survival. So Keene has created an action novel where action is futile. And this only increases the horror, as life and all meaning are cornered and devoured.

by Nemo Swift
reprinted from BOFFM #4 (forthcoming)