Week 13 - Paranormal is the New Normal

Generation Dead by Daniel Waters

Generation Dead
By Daniel Waters
LPL Call # F Wal

So my boyfriend and a few of my friends from the MLIS program are Zombie junkies. Ben (my bf) loves the Left 4 Dead video game. He plays it all the time. At first I was totally not into the whole zombie thing. Over time I started to like playing this video game and sometimes I will watch him play. Zombie culture is out there and people love it. We even have a zombie themed bathroom in our apartment! (That was the least I could do since Ben moved to London with me for my schooling).
There are numerous young adult fiction novels today on paranormal activities such as vampires, werewolves, and zombies. Daniel Waters' Generation Dead is on the subject of teenage zombies. I am still trying to understand the whole zombie apocalypse and how it can occur. In this novel, Waters describes zombies as the "living impaired" (Waters: 3). I thought, "Okay. Kinda cool and catchy." But I'm still not really getting into this whole phenomenon yet.

My personal biases of not believing in the possibility of zombies taking over our planet or even the notion of people living despite they are dead -aka zombies, held me back from enjoying this book. However, after Waters describes the possibility of teenagers being able to become zombies based on the "Frankenstein Formula Theory" where a certain mixture of teenage hormones and fast food preservatives allow for teens to not die and become the living impaired (Waters: 7) made me think this is a bit more logical and I can try and look past the truth that zombies can or can not be a possibility in the future.

I choose this book for this weeks LIS 9364 class discussion not only because it was the first one to arrive on my holds list, but for the reason that there was a zombie cheerleader on the front. I was a cheerleader for my highs school and I thought "A zombie cheerleader, now this is neat!" Unfortunately, there where no living impaired cheerleaders referenced within the book, just living cheerleaders. There was however Tommy Williams, who was a zombie football player in the novel. False advertisement! But here you can see a marketing strategy maybe instilled on the publishing company. Put a female zombie cheerleader and we may just get a lot of female teen readers. Why not put a male zombie football player on the cover and attract both male and female teens? Hello more sales, and more readers.

Despite all of this information of me not believing in zombies, I enjoyed this book. Despite it being a 392 page novel, it is a quick read as the language used is easy to understand. The characters where all great (both alive and living impaired). Not only is romance a theme within this novel, but tolerance and understanding for others who are different then oneself is also discussed (a great theme to discuss within a young adult novel as they to are learning to do the same). Overall, I would rate this book a 3.5 out of 5 stars!