Steps taken forward...

In about three hours I will take the stage at the Skylark Cafe and Tavern on Delridge in West Seattle for the Black Friday edition of the West Side Burlesque Revue.

Tonight I will be debuting a new fan dance to seanan_mcguire's song "Take Advantage". The starts at 9:30 and features an array of local talent, both burlesque performers and amazing belly dancers.

For more information, see my website.

Feed is an amazing ride!

Mira Grant is the open pen name of Seanan McGuire, author of the October Daye books from Daw Books and the Sparrow Hill Road series appearing in the Edge of Propinquity. The short of it is that she writes a lot and manages to keep the quality level consistently high across her work.

Feed is a political thriller involving up and coming journalist who run an online blog and the story just happens to have zombies in it. Don't get me wrong, the living dead are important to the story she's telling, but it's not just about the zombies. Unlike most stories of the living dead, this story does start at the beginning, but starts about 20 years after the Rising. Seanan deftly and vividly builds her world, one populated by people leveling in fear, and builds a subtext to the story that pushes a sharp social commentary on the state of our world without being overbearing.

Feed is a story in which our heroes and heroines are smart and the stereo-typical "rules of surviving" in a horror story don't come into play here. I like that a lot because we get to see how people who are used to living with the horror that doesn't lie down. You would think that with a story like this that would be a lot of exposition that interrupts the flow of the story. In many stories, we don't know the origins of the monster and in other stories we and wish we didn't. Here, Seanan, solved the boring exposition problem though an ingenious way. Blog entries by key characters are attached to the end of each chapter, shedding light on the pages before or setting you up for a hard fall in the next chapter.

Seanan's love the genre is apparent in the approach she took with Feed. The zombies in this book are a monster of our own making, science with ramifications that no one could see coupled with a well intentioned act of terrorism and the world goes sideways. But the worst monster in the book isn't the undead. No, that monster still lives and breathes and walks among us. Seanan ups the ante in third act of the story and slams the hammer down on the reader by taking a huge gamble in the story arc. That gamble pays off for her in a huge way, but like me, you may be calling her names at that point.

In all, Feed was an excellent and fascinating read for me and I highly recommend it. This is her book that I like most so far and it will live on my bookshelf next to Stephen King and Clive Barker when I finally get it back from the friends I've lent it to. I'll be coming back and reading this story again.