Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Every generation has its way of dealing with the undead. Whether it comes in the form of political observation transformed into pop culture critique, or the fierce biting satire of purposeful declaration of war against a population willing to look the other way until the effect of wrong is found scratching at the door and the sound of rabid death is proclaimed up on what they see is their acre of space in the universe; each generation deals with the fall out of the horror that awaits in their own way.
Our fascination with zombies goes back long before The Night of Living Dead became a huge hit for George A. Romero, even more perhaps than Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend or W.B. Seabrook’s The Magic Island, it taps into the darker reaches of our collective minds that sees humanity’s greatest asset, that of community, as being the breeding ground for inertia, and whilst it is untrue, that community is its own indomitable spirit which must be preserved, somewhere deep down in us the feeling of being eaten alive by society, of losing our individuality to the faceless demons that wear the suits of so called respectability is a powerful and frightening prospect.
The undead always rise, it is just the inference of the story, the way they are presented that captures the modern belief on how dangerous they are; and in modern times, and certainly looking back upon the tale with the eyes that have lived through a global pandemic for the first time in a hundred years, the smell of sickness, the fear of what lays beyond the front door, is framed with intensity and grief, of humour and gut-wrenching observation by Liverpool’s D. E. McCluskey in his 2018 novel Z: A Love Story.
A writer who isn’t afraid to tackle a subject that is vastly different to the previous book published, whose pace, energy, and fearlessness at the prospect of the blank white screen is a testament to refusing to belief that we are held fast to the ridged nature of what the public perceives the writer to be, stuck in their own formula, held tightly to one genre, the living death of inspiration personified as they nibble away at ideas and eat the flesh of procrastination.
Zombie films have reached a crescendo, and it takes something almost unique or brave to set the tone of difference in which the viewer will take an active interest. Novels enjoy a more fitting freedom, and in Z: A Love Story that freedom comes from having the persuasion and belief to adapt a long-standing poem into a novel of immediate joy and intrigue, one set against love, as every good ode and sonnet should aspire, and one that D. E. McCluskey takes full advantage of as he sets a world defining moment in two young people’s lives against the backdrop of wilful ignorance of weaponising death that leads to a catastrophic worldwide assault on humanity.
Political? Certainly! There is no escaping the allegory or the plain in sight symbol that is weaved consciously throughout the book, but it is the beauty of love that is the foundation of the tale that catches the eye, and one in which its ending is enough to catch the breath of the unexpected resolution in a world that has gone to Hell.
Z: A Love Story is a hit them between the eye’s addition to the growing works of D. E. McCluskey, and one is a fond kiss to the forehead of the zombie genre.
Ian D. Hall