But the fact is, you and me, we ain’t in control of the fates remitted us. We just got to discharge them the best we can, according to whatever frail laws we got […] We’re just playing the parts written down and put before us.
If you’re looking for cliché in the shape of a lone wanderer’s
quest for survival in a zombie-infested apocalypse, then you’ve come to the right
place. Alden Bell’s The Reapers are the Angels (2010) is one kick-ass
gorefest with all the usual tropes: cruising through ghost towns in stolen
cars, slaughtering the undead with guns and huge knives, picking up poor
unfortunates, and fighting with other survivors, all the while being haunted by
the past. Bell makes a particular point of rendering the undead – ‘meatskins’
and ‘slugs’ as they’re known – in horrific detail: their decaying flesh,
exposed bones, the rotten smells and viscera. Yet here is where the hackneyed similarities
end because Bell’s story isn’t as superficial as all that.
This is the story of Temple, a teenage girl, born into a
world where the dead have come back to life. For her, this is normal, there is
no ‘before’ except what she sees in the faded pages of magazines. She lives under
the gaze of a ‘slick god’, in search of His miracles, content to let life do
what it knows best. As an orphan (this makes the third ‘orphan’ story I’ve
reviewed now), she seems to have no concept or need for family, and yet she is
haunted by the memory of losing the only ‘family’ she remembers; she finds herself
caught between the brutish pleasure of killing the undead and the comfort of community,
so rare in this shattered world. This makes her a bizarrely likeable character,
both battle-hardened and cynical for someone so young, yet full of personality,
philosophy, and respect for those she meets. At times, Bell’s colloquial and fantastic
language seems reminiscent of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, lending
Temple a fittingly childish wonder and attitude. She seems so in love with the
world, despite its flaws, and so content to marvel at it all alone. Yet when
she saves the gentle mute, Maury, a giant with a ‘skillet face, a frame like vegetal
growth […] and a mind with no doors or windows’, it comes as a surprise – albeit
a small one – and we see her aimless wandering begin to take on a purpose.
But something always comes along to derail such fantasies
and, as a girl in what increasingly seems to be a man’s world, Temple quickly
finds herself being hunted by Moses, a man whose philosophies make him her ‘eerie
inversion’. And, as this is a story with family at its heart, it’s understandable
that family (without giving away too much of a spoiler) is Moses’ motivation
for wishing Temple dead. His drive to be the one to kill her takes on an ironically
protective, even loving, edge as he often fights to save her, once stating ‘Do
what you want [to her] but you kill her and I’m gonna rain hell on you’. With
their every encounter, it made me think he might finally let her go, and that is
somehow one of the scariest parts. It’s not the shambling, infectious menace of
the undead that makes me afraid to turn the page, but the constant feeling of
pursuit, the fear that comes from entering an empty house or waking from a nightmare
to find it is, in fact, reality. That and the vile and creepy nature of several
of the men she meets.
But for all the novel’s darkness, decay and depravity, there
is lightness too. Some of Temple’s encounters, like Dirk, the Griersons, and a
small group of hunters, are with genuine people who have nothing but honest intentions.
They have dreams just like her of seeing all the world has to offer, though for
some these dreams can only stay in their heads. Even the rare act of sex, completely
implicit, focuses on the enjoyment of feeling a living thing inside of her and she
seems to revel in her own femininity. There is also a profound sense of
biblical grandeur to the story, as water washes away sins and heralds ‘Noah’s
flood’, and everything is fated to happen for a reason, but underpinning it all
is the inherent belief in good and evil, and Temple’s conviction that she belongs
to the latter camp. She has killed so many people, living and dead, that she
believes her hands are ‘hands of death’, which could make her one of the angel-reapers
of the title – and indeed, by the story’s close, I’d like to think that’s true.
This is quite simply a voyage into the human psyche, exploring
our deepest desires, impulses, and beliefs when faced with a world gone wrong,
when survival is the name of the game and it’s as much every man/woman for
themselves as it is the need for strength through community. Family is at its
heart, whether that’s honouring it, making it, protecting it, or losing it, and
this sits alongside its deeply religious aspect, of existing under the hand of
God, of acknowledging the beauty and rights of his every creation, and of living
through Hell to get to Heaven.
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