San Diego 2014

San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats by Mira Grant

This novella is probably not the best thing Mira Grant has written—Feed was just that good—but it is my favorite of her works. Unlike the Newsflesh trilogy, in which the characters had lived nearly their entire lives in a world with zombies, and Countdown, which chronicled the origin of the Kellis-Amberlee zombie virus, San Diego 2014 puts the reader in the middle of a zombie outbreak among people who were unprepared. In this manner, San Diego 2014 is like the typical zombie story. The similarities end there.

For the first time in the Newsflesh series—and something that’s fairly new to me as a reader—we get ample opportunity to study zombie behavior. In the small, closed environment, where no one knew how to deal with them, the zombies went, for the most part, unchallenged. Their undisturbed behavior was fascinating. It wasn’t what I expected, but it makes a lot of sense. It was very well thought out by the author. More importantly, it was conveyed very well.

The story takes place inside a San Diego convention center during Preview Night of Comic-Con; thus, the characters are people who are familiar with the concept and mythology of zombies. They don’t all run and panic. Instead, many take up arms and fight. How these people fight is what makes the story so great. The heroism of some of the characters, especially those who make conscious efforts to not put others at risk, is written in a very real manner. None of the plot comes across as unrealistic (relatively speaking…it is a zombie story, after all) or pasted on. The bonds formed and chance meetings come about organically.

In the beginning, the style of the story put me off a bit. The further I read, the more I changed my opinion. The back and forth nature of the telling (bouncing between Mahir interviewing a survivor and an actual omniscient third-person narrative) works. It helps the pacing of the story while also building the tension and emotion.

There is no suspense here; we know from the very beginning how things turn out. That knowing makes all the action, all the heroic decisions, even more tragic. Wonderful, wonderful piece.

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