Swashbuckle, indeed.

Dec 9, 2009 by Joshua    No Comments    Posted under: book feature, books

Title: Boneshaker

Author: Cherie Priest

Genre: steampunk, zombie horror, sci-fi, fantasy

Last month, I finished reading Cherie Priest’s “Boneshaker”, a sort of sci-fi/horror/fantasy novel published earlier this year. The novel is heralded for its use of steampunk aesthetic – goggles, gas masks, mechanized contraptions powered by steam – as well as other elements that play heavily in the plot, most notably airships and zombies. It is certainly no literary masterpiece, looking deeply into the soul of man and listening for whatever echoes might reverberate outward. It does, however, hold plenty of adventure, and the various characters are vibrant in their own ways.

In “Boneshaker”, an alternate timeline exists in which, during the Civil War, settlers travel to Seattle with the promise of gold buried in the icy land. An inventor, Leviticus Blue, is commissioned to create a machine that can dig beneath the ice and bring up the riches. Thus, he creates the Boneshaker, a monstrous drilling engine.

But before the man can unveil the machine to the world, something goes awry. In what is later considered possibly a test run gone bad, a malfunction, or even a deliberate move, the Boneshaker takes off from beneath Blue’s home and grinds a tunnel just underneath the main city area, collapsing the busy street and killing or injuring several citizens. Even worse, a poisonous gas issues forth from the scar left in the earth, a gas that turns skin gangrenous and brings the dead back to life as flesh-hungry zombies.

But all of that is in the past. Some 16 years later, the people of Seattle have built a wall around the now “blight”-filled city, living in the outskirts surrounding the forsaken area. Among them is Briar Wilkes, the widow of Dr. Blue, and her son Ezekiel, born just after the wall’s completion. The two try to live a normal life – as normal as possible in the remnants of the walled-off city – despite constant insults and threats from those around them for being associated with the man who caused the whole mess. Briar wishes to move on, to live without attachment to the man she once married. Zeke, however, having never known his father, cannot help but be curious about the man, about what really happened that day the gas came.

Zeke learns that people are still alive on the other side of the wall. A whole community of people are eking out a living, avoiding the “rotters” and converting the blight into a deadly drug. One day, he slips behind the wall in search of his parents’ old home, hoping to find some clue about his father and about what kind of man he was. When Zeke does not return before long, Briar goes to great lengths to follow her son behind the wall, into the world she left, only to find a whole new world full of danger and deception – as well as zombies, a few airship battles, and a fair sprinkle of steampunk minutiae.

Despite its reliance on a number of movie-like tropes, “Boneshaker” stands on its own for its story and characterization.

After the initial introductory segment, the action is kept along through daring escapes and zombie chases. Priest uses her prose well to clearly express the danger of the situations that Briar and Zeke found themselves in beyond the wall, and her way of jumping from mother to son and back again leaves the reader in anticipation for what will happen next. Very rarely does the narrative lull, as the characters are always on a time limit: The gas masks they use to breathe through the dense blight have a limited usage, and a rotter attack is always waiting just around the next corner.

The various people that Briar and Zeke meet in the walled-off city are full of personality. From surly airship captains to silent Chinamen to warm-hearted cyborg barmaids (well, one warm-hearted cyborg barmaid), the cast is nothing if not diverse. Everyone appears to be either more than willing to help or more than happy to hurt, and some are found to try both. The most characteristic of them all is Briar, a stubborn woman who refuses to let the blight, rotters or any man stand in her way as she searches for her only son.

If any readers find that their ears perk up at the mention of zombies, steampunk, or a combination of the two, they would most likely benefit from picking up “Boneshaker”. They might find even more excitement in learning that the novel is the first in a four-part anthology that Priest has planned. Though the other stories are not set in the same zombie-ridden Seattle landscape, they exist within the same world, most likely featuring more steampunk and less flesh-eating, re-animated corpses.

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