Humanist+HumoristErin Reads: What Moves The Dead, The Queue, Mogworld
What Moves The Dead: Another T. Kingfisher novel, and, wow, it’s a good thing I didn’t start with this one. DNF halfway through. I figured out the twist pretty quickly, double-checked on Wikipedia that I was right, and wasn’t gripped enough by the characters to enjoy the process of “listening to them bumble around for a couple more hours failing to figure it out.”
Future game plan: stick with her fantasy works, skip the horror.
The Queue, by Basma Abdel Aziz: Bought this on Audible years ago, and didn’t remember not liking it. So I downloaded it when I tried out Libation, and gave it a re-listen.
Definitely worth it. Reminds me of 1984, in that it’s a near-future dystopia run by a government that is as totalitarian as it is surreal. At the same time, it’s set in Unnamed Middle Eastern/Muslim City (the author is from Cairo), so it all plays out in a way that’s culturally-specific to that part of the world.
Cool and enriching to see which parts are different. Depressing to see that certain things are the same. The POV residents have a range of perspectives and life experiences, but they’ve all been more-or-less frogboiled into accepting an untenable situation as Just How Things Work. One guy spends the whole book actively dying, but he was injured during the Disgraceful Events that nobody will talk about directly, and his friends/loved ones/doctors keep running into “of course the government will authorize him to get life-saving surgery…just as soon as you have all the proper paperwork.” The titular Queue is all the citizens lined up to get their paperwork. It hasn’t moved for a month now. But it’s going to start soon! Somewhere between the MOASS and the Rapture, probably!
Also, there’s a character named Yehia, which I assume is the same name as Yehya Badr with a slightly different Anglicization. So that was entertaining.
Mogworld, by Yahtzee Croshaw: Checked this out based on how much I liked Will Save The Galaxy For Food, and it did not disappoint.
Starts as a fantasy story about a necromancer overlord’s reign of terror through his undead hordes, but from the POV of Jim, a beleaguered zombie who just wants to die (again) (for good, this time). Then it develops into a parody of fantasy-adventure video-game mechanics. Then you start to see the chat logs between the game developers. Then Jim starts to see the chat logs between the game developers…
It’s like if Terry Pratchett wrote Guilded Age. It’s full of absolutely incredible turns of phrase. (One that I had to stop and write down: a group of supernatural beings is described as “heading off to deliver unwanted resurrections, like a flock of poorly-briefed storks.”)
There’s a character type you see sometimes, where the male protagonist has the support of a devoted female hanger-on, who he finds grating and annoying and never appreciates…but he keeps her around because she does useful things for him. She conveniently never notices his disdain, so she keeps giving him endless support for zero care/support/respect in return. (Misa from Death Note is…a deconstruction of this trope? A commentary, at least.)
Mogworld pulls a twist on this that I’ve never seen before. Undead bodies don’t heal, so Meryl is the local expert in sewing them back together. When the plot drags Jim off on a solo adventure, Meryl follows, conveniently dedicating herself to repairing all the dramatic injuries he gets along the way. But, the reason is: Jim is the only other zombie from Meryl’s home country…and Meryl is a huge [their country] supremacist! So there’s something Jim can legitimately resent about her, he’s not just being an entitled sexist. (They both do a bit of learning and growing as the story goes on, too.)
One warning: the R-slur gets thrown around a bunch. It’s a book that deals with video-gamer culture and was published in 2010, so this isn’t hugely unrealistic…but the writing mostly doesn’t have other slurs/profanity outside of that, so it was kind of a jumpscare.
As long as that’s not a dealbreaker, definitely give this one a read.
