THE FOREST OF HANDS AND TEETH

Zombies are a cheap shorthand for the end of the world. It costs next to nothing to plaster your friends with corn starch and derma-wax and shamble them in front of a camera. It’s cheaper still if you shut yourself in a basement with baggy eyes and endless coffee, clattering out crowded page after crowded page of the living dead. If left to the uninspired, the wrist underneath that shorthand would’ve grown achy and tired long ago, but lucky us, there are talented people out there, talented enough to reanimate the dead.

People like Carrie Ryan. Her young adult novel The Forest of Hands and Teeth debuted in March. It reads like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale crossed with Richard Matheson’s I am Legend. Generations after zombies have claimed the world, a tiny village holds out against the apocalypse, protected from a wilderness of mindless cannibals by fence and by faith. A young woman dreams of a world beyond the forest, a life outside the fundamentalist beliefs of her village. Mary can’t stop thinking about the Ocean, inspired by the stories her mother tells her of a vast body of salt-water, unimaginably vast, for “…how could God allow so much water to become useless?” But when her mother dies and she is forced to choose between marriage or the Sisterhood, between a life devoted to a man or a life devoted to God, Mary begins to question everything she’s told and everything she’s ever believed.

The Forest of Hands and Teeth is peppered with flaws. Unreliable narrators abound in post-apocalyptic fiction. If the world wimped out, up would become down, cats would chase dogs, Uwe Boll would make a good movie etc, etc. However, there are unreliable narrators and there is creaky storytelling and The Forest of Hands and Teeth is, at times, creakier than robot porn. At one point, Mary is surrounded by the ‘Unconsecrated’. She is knocked unconscious, awakening later to find herself alive and free of the dead. Is it a miracle? Is it blind luck? Circuit Sluts: Indecent Download is on its way to those lucky contestants who said it's a lazy way of writing yourself out of a corner. It’s hinted that the Sisterhood guard terrible secrets about the apocalypse, that they know more than they’re telling about the zombie hordes, but if you're expecting that to be paid off you're reading the wrong book. This is the first of a trilogy, and Ryan is comfortable saving any answers, even the ghosts of answers, for book two and three. What answers are here are so few and far apart the dots could be joined into any shape.

Where The Forest of Hands and Teeth succeeds is in packing an emotional punch. Ryan’s prose is a haunted, confessional whisper and it’s hard not to empathise with a main character determined to hold onto her dreams, no matter how tough the circumstances. Forced into the Sisterhood after her mother dies, Mary refuses to be broken by a routine of silence and servitude. She bides her time, an atheist in nun’s clothing, sneaking out of her room each night in a hunt for the truth. What do the Sisterhood know about the Unconsecrated? Who is the mysterious girl imprisoned in the room next to hers? The answers might mean exile from the village, but she searches anyway. When the love of her life, a love she thought unrequited, pulls a 180, the relationship comes with a price. Him or the Ocean. His love or her curiosity. Her decision has an emotional payoff that almost makes up for the novel's lack of a narrative one.

Sometimes the constant, sombre tone grates a bit, but for the most part The Forest of Hands and Teeth is an enjoyable read. It's another example of the increasing richness of young adult literature, and it's nice to see zombies used to discuss the clash between reason and faith. It's there in post-apocalyptic fiction, but in a zombie story it's usually second fiddle to the action. Speaking of action, Ryan isn't afraid of having her characters throw down. There's a particularily rocking scene where Mary fights off the undead with a scythe, and if you're a romance fan, you'll find the obligatory love triangle/quadrangle to get hot and bothered by. With Charlie Higson's ya novel The Enemy hitting the bookshops and Zombieland hitting the cinemas this month, The Forest of Hands and Teeth is yet another sign that 2009 is a good year for the end of the world. ~Piotr Harmsden