After reading Drop Dead Gorgeous by Wayne Simmons, I was keen to get started on Flu, another post-apocalyptic zombie tale set in Simmons’ native Belfast.
The book cover provides the following synopsis:
“A Deadly strain of flu has mutated.
Two cops fight their way through an angry and frightened crowd to gain entry to an apartment block in Belfast. They have received reports of a fresh outbreak of the virus and are met with the bloodshot eyes of a six-year-old Lithuanian girl. She is in the final stages of infection and must be quarantined.
Out on the streets, Geri finds herself looking down the buisiness end of a ski-masked man’s revolver. Nearby, hell-bent on self-preservation, the shorn-headed punk Lark peeks out the window of his terraced-house hideout. In neighbouring Finaghy, churchgoer Karen looks to the stoic and level-headed Pat for a paternal figure, seemingly oblivious to his chequered past as an IRA gunrunner. Meanwhile, what remains of the armed forces congregate in a run-down base twenty miles south of Belfast.
As the flu continues to mutate, another phenomenon rocks the very foundation of Belfast…. Infected bodies suddenly begin to rise. Scorned by an angry red sun, the callused brick and mortar of a devasted city plays host to a bitter and bloody struggle between the living and the dead. Finding its humanity is Belfast’s only hope.”
On the face of it, Flu appears to be a bog-standard zombie book; and to a certain extent, that’s true… there’s an outbreak of an unidentified virus, all hell breaks loose, authorities try to quarantine, disparate groups of survivors, etc… but to leave my critique of Flu at that would simply not be fair and similarly to Drop Dead Gorgeous, Flu is set in Northern Ireland and once again it serves to provide a unique staging ground for the author’s apocalypse to play out in.
Flu’s characters are well-developed, human and entirely believable. However and more importantly, the characters in Flu are moulded by the unique circumstances afforded to them by the political and religious divisions within Northern Ireland, adding a compelling dimension to this above par genre offering.
Once again Simmons succeeds in creating a post-apocalyptic situation that feels grubby and real, his description of the characters’ sensory experiences hammer home the state of affairs in which they find themselves in. When zombies are shot, brains and skull are splattered everywhere; when rotten flesh is disturbed, flies rise from feeding; and these are the tamer examples from the visceral episodes interspersed regularly throughout Flu. In fact, Flu MIGHT be a little too real for some readers with plenty of profanity, drug use, strong horror and other parts of the plot which truly expose the darker side of human nature… but if you’re of a delicate disposition, why are you reading horror?!
If you’re looking for a run-fight-run zombie tale, this isn’t it, fiends.
Although Flu has more than its fair share of disease, death and despatching of the walking dead, it is not the primary focus of the novel. This is very much a soid character-driven story that takes some of the extreme personalities forged in contemporary Northern Ireland and tosses them into the mix with a zombie apocalypse and observes the ensuing situation, highlighting how pointless their respective standpoints were before the zombie outbreak by emphasising that fact through their united struggle against the undead.
At one stage, I thought Simmons was going to take the easy way out and drift off into a written version of Day of the Dead, this fear was swiftly allayed and Simmons proceeds to deliver a bleak slice of horror that although set in Belfast like Drop Dead Gorgeous, is distinctly different and succeeds in creating a work of horror that strips away the niceties of societal constructs and lays bare the human condition, complete with all its fallacies, base desires and instincts.
I can’t wait to get my teeth sunk right into Fever, the sequel to Flu…
