The MZD: a novel of undead horror

So my latest project is a bit of a diversion from my usual navel-gazing, 'literary' (pretentious?) type writing. I've gone genre, mixing my formerly mild obsession with zombies and my current job of teaching English in Korea. This means (can you guess?) I've written a novella of zombie horror, set in South Korea.

It's called The MZD, and it's pretty much done - just a little tweaking, then a conversion to ePub format, then it's ready for you, my adoring reader. So. I can sense the questions mounting. Here, then, is a pre-emptive FAQ:

Q: A zombie book?
A: Yup. zombies.

Q: Aren't there like, hundreds of zombie novels out there already?
A: I'd say there are actually thousands. The market's pretty saturated with them right now.

Q: Is that a problem?
A: We'll see.

Q: Okay, so, I'm a zombie fan, myself. But I'm pretty discriminating. Are they fast zombies or slow? Is it a virus or space dust that turns people into zombies? Is is a post-apocalyptic wasteland of cannibals and madmen? Are there gratuitous kills and bloody mayhem?
A: It's not post-apocalypse, but it's about the outbreak itself, and people in the early stages of dealing with society falling apart. The zombies themselves are pretty traditional, except for the means of re-animation - that's where it's a little different. I won't say any more - part of the fun is reading it and seeing where it diverges from other z-lit out there.

Q: What format will it be released in? How do I get it?
A: It will be an eBook available on Amazon for sure, and probably bn.com, and other outlets like Smashwords. I will also make it available as a simple pdf for people who don't have e-readers as well. Since it's relatively short (about 40,000 words/100 pages), it'll probably cost around 3 bucks.

Q: When can I get my copy?
A: By mid February, 2012.

Q: Any excerpts? A synopsis?
A: Coming soon. Be patient.

Q: What's your next project? Teenage vampires?
A: Sure, why not? But they'll be real vampires, ugly, and disgusting, with zits and bad taste in music.

Q: Are you worried that this work compromises the value of your more literary work?
A: I don't understand the question. Do you want to buy a zombie book or not?

Q: Where else can I follow your progress?
A: The MZD has a facebook page here. Go and enjoy. There are reviews of other zombie works, updates on future projects, etc. Plus, I tweet.

That's all for now. 

Post more questions in the comments below, and I'll get to them when I can.

Decision Tree: Korea

You may or may not know we're moving to Korea in a month. What that means is that everything I own now belongs to one of three categories: 1) Take to Korea 2) Put into Storage 3) Get rid of forever. How to decide, especially with the disposal part? I made a flowchart to help:

Tournament of Books First round Summary

Link: The Morning News Tournament of Books.

Well, I came out of round one with a respectable six of eight correct picks. Here are the matchups in round two, starting next week:

Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen, v. Room, by Emma Donoghue
Matt Dellinger, judge
Matt Dellinger is the author of a book about America's national transportation infrastructure; his links to contemporary fiction are not quite clear to me. I'm interested if my knee-jerk stereotype of him as a clear-headed rational thinker will bias him towards Franzen's realistic novel of society and manners, and against Donoghue's parlor-creepiness. Another part of me thinks that Room's reportedly week second half will doom it against the furious and constantly unrelenting onslaught of Franzen's literary chops, regardless of the judge. You're good, Room, but Freedom has gravitas. Winner: Freedom

The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobson v. A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan
Elif Bautman, judge
Ms. Bautman wrote a book about Russian Literature; she lives in Istanbul, where she reports for the New Yorker. Her international background makes this matchup hard to call. My instincts put Goon Squad, with its compassion for character, originality of ideas and complexity of execution in a far higher league than Finkler. Finkler was okay, but tended toward caricature, and rarely gave insights into its theme - Jewish Identity - instead re-hashing debates that have been going on for centuries. My head says Goon Squad in a walk, but this could be the upset of the round. Winner: Goon Squad

Nox, by Ann Carson v. Next, by James Hynes
John Williams, Judge
Nox beat Lords of Misrule in the first round; this upset people who saw it more as an artifact than a narrative, though its emotional impact is great enough for the right reader that it can upset any book in its path. Next, which I read last week, I found to be of enormous emotional impact at the time, but that impact is fading a bit, although from a novelist's standpoint, its structure and themes are close to perfect. The judge is an old-school book blogger from The Second Pass, so I sense him wishing to restore order to this bracket, and Next's old-fashioned goodness is the perfect book to do that. Winner: Next

Model Home, by Eric Puchner v. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender
Kate Ortega, judge
Model Home was the other upset winner of this bracket, powering past the heavily favored (and apparently over-rated) Gary Shteyngart. Aimee Bender squeaked out a victory in a tepid first-round matchup. Both are gimmicky, white-bread melodramas set in SoCal suburbs, and the judge is an editor for the Wall Street Journal. I have no idea how this one will turn out, but my judge-meter says Ortega will take Bender's food-tasting as gateway to adult emotional relationship trick to her heart more than she will than the shenanigans of a bunch of hard-luck west-coasters in Reagan's 80's. Winner: Lemon Cake.

Next: By James Hynes

I might have never heard of Next were it not for the Morning News Tournament of Books. I'm glad I read it, and grateful to the TOB for bringing it to my attention. I hope this book goes far; it deserves a bigger audience, and it should be able to generate huge discussions. Be aware, mild spoilers are included.

Next, by James Hynes, is a novel fundamentally concerned with men's issues. I say this as a warning and as praise; I can see women opening up Next and not finishing it, in the same way men pick up chick-lit and can't stand it. But for a certain kind of man - that is, for white males approaching fifty - Next is a deep, complicated meditation on the role of men in contemporary America.

It would be a stretch, but not much of one, to call the main character of Next, Kevin Quinn, a typical macho asshole. He sees women as objects, either of desire or scorn. He's over fifty but has a much younger girlfriend, who is a source of bemusement, exasperation and terror when she's not delivering great sex. She has him so spooked with talk of having a baby he's fled south on a plane from his native Michigan to the arid, alien world of Austin, Texas, for a job interview. It's also a few days after a major terror attack in Europe, so he's spooked about that as well.

Once in Austin, with six hours to kill, Kevin freaks out a little. He becomes dangerously obsessed with his seatmate from the plane, an even younger woman who reminds him of his most fulfilling sex partner ever, from twenty-five years earlier, a woman he'd taken sexual refuge with when the woman he was really in love with told him she could never love him. His meditations distract him not only from the job interview, but from current events which are about to overwhelm him.

Kevin has a problem typical to men: He's aware of his emotions, of his own shortcomings, and that his instinctive responses are often misogynistic and cruel. White liberal guilt, in short. But he has no mechanism to process his filters into consistently rational action, so when it comes time to act, he's paralyzed. He backs into every big decision. It's like Hemingway through a modern mirror, but where Hemingway's characters were able process their sensitivity into masculine hyper-activity, Kevin Quinn founders, emasculated by female empowerment and societal expectations, becoming resentful and unable to make decisions.

There's a lot of micro-detail in this novel: it takes place over eight hours, and every moment of Kevin's life and its middle-class bourgeois consumerism, is examined in minute detail, to the extent that you wonder why you should keep reading. Please do. Because the end may look like an action movie, with explosions and opportunities for heroism, but it's not, really. It's about redemption. Or, rather, the mechanisms of redemption - to ask whether Quinn is redeemed or delusional at the end is perhaps the central question I'm left with when this novel ended. In that, it echoes Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find, and to paraphrase the Misfit's final words: Quinn would have been a better man if there were someone there to shoot him every minute.

I'm sure other readers had other reactions; I'd love to hear them.

Tournament of Books: Matchup Eight

Okay, home stretch. This is the final matchup of the Morning News Tournament of Books. As of this writing, they've already started judging, and I'm one-for-one. Go me!


Bloodroot by Amy Greene vs. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender

Judge: Catherine George

Bloodroot
I've always been leery of the new Southern Gothic, where hill-country characters go on and on about the quirks of their ancestors. Throw in country backwoods mythology, and I'm completely lost. I read the sample on Amazon, in which five characters were introduced in the first paragraph; two pages later the narrator changed to a kid with a horse. It was a nice little slice of melancholy southern gothic, it may have been wonderful but I'm not a fan of it.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender
This is a classic gimmick book: an adolescent girl gains the gift of 'tasting' emotions in food cooked by other people. Reviews are good, and Aimee Bender is a quirky but very talented writer. The gimmick is okay, and either a perfect symbol of the burdens of female bonding and adulthood, or a cheap trick that wears thin after one hundred pages. You, intrepid reader, get to decide.

Judge Catherine George was picked via a contest from among The Morning News's regular readers to judge the first round of the Tournament. She is a lawyer and aspiring novelist from British Columbia.

Summary: This is a round where I am definitely not the target audience for either book. Of these two, I am more interested in Aimee Bender. The judge's Canadian background lends me to think she'll be drawn to Bloodroot as an entomologist is drawn to a newly discovered millipede. However, Bender is a Big Name, meaning she can produce the big payoff on demand. This is a toss-up, and in a toss-up, go with sales figures.

Winner: The Peculiar Sadness of Lemon Cake. Mmm... Lemon Cake.

Tournament of Books: Matchup Seven

Even as the judging begins, I'm posting my matchup summaries. But here it is: Matchup Seven in the Morning News Tournament of Books. Almost there...

The matchup:
Super Sad True Love Story, by Gary Shteyngart vs. Model Home, by Erich Puchner

Judge: Matthew Baldwin

Super Sad True Love Story
I read a chapter of this in The New Yorker, where it masqueraded as a short story. I loved the concept: a love story set in a dystopic, decaying future New York, where technology's assault on individuality is in its final stages, and Homeland Security's assault on individual liberties is nearing completion. Everyone in the book accepts and revels in the status quo except, seemingly, the main character, who is mocked by his new girlfriend for his adherence of anachronisms like printed media.

Model Home
Reviews mark this as a cross between Freedom and Weeds, a loss of innocence set in Southern California's sun-drenched banal 1980's, well before the events of Super Sad. It's probably pretty good, though the central plot - a family on hard times is forced to occupy a model  home in a development - is lifted directly from the beloved sitcom Arrested Development.

Judge: Matthew Baldwin is a co-founder/editor at the Morning News.

Summary:
In a field with two other strong domestic dramas, and up against the powerhouse prose and bombastic vision of Shteyngart's prodigious talents, Model Home looks like an easy first-round knock-off. But, as I've said before, you never know.

Winner: Super Sad True Love Story

Tournament of Books: Matchup Six

Round Six is another matchup of novels with like-minded themes in the Morning News Tournament of Books. Please, no wagering.

Next, by James Hynes v. So Much for That, by Lionel Shriver

Judge: Jessica Francis Kane

Next
This novel seems themed around late adolescent white-boy angst; Kevin Quinn is fed up with his life and wants a change. He flies to Austin Texas for a clandestine job interview, and over the next eight hours has a series of reminiscences, a new romance, and brushes with modern homeland security. Reviewers have commented on Quinn's obsession with cultural minutiae, and the late twist may elevate this novel from the domestic drama it appears to be at first.

So Much for That
Shep Knacker is ready for retirement to an idyllic third world retreat; when his wife gets sick, he's forced into a decision: stay with her or abandon her to stick with the plan of an island safe haven. There are a lot of developments involving America's Health care system, and Shep's need to stay with his wife and in America feels like this is another domestic mid-life crisis novel, albiet with higher stakes.

The judge, Jessica Francis Kane, is a young novelist in her own right; her second novel, The Report, was shortlisted for several prizes.

Summary
A matchup of equals here; two white men in typically white, middle-class conflicts. Whereas So Much for That tackles larger social issues, Next feels more intimate, and perhaps more relevant. Both smack of privileged, middle-class whininess. I know health care is a bigger issue than a young man wanting a new life, but I'm more intrigued to read Next. I'm thinking the judge likes big social issues, so I think that's where she's going.

Winner: So Much for That. A gut feeling.