Book Review - The Reapers are the Angels by Alden Bell

Synopsis:  For twenty-five years, civilization has survived in meager enclaves, guarded against a plague of the dead. Temple wanders this blighted landscape, keeping to herself and keeping her demons inside her heart. She can't remember a time before the zombies, but she does remember an old man who took her in and the younger brother she cared for until the tragedy that set her on a personal journey toward redemption. Moving back and forth between the insulated remnants of society and the brutal frontier beyond, Temple must decide where ultimately to make a home and find the salvation she seeks.

First Line:  "God is a slick god."

Random Quote:  "See, there's a music to the world and you got to be listening otherwise you'll miss it for sure.  Like when she comes out of the house and the nighttime air feels dreamy cold on her face and it smells like the pureness of a fresh land just started.  Like it was something old and dusty and broken taken off the shelf to make room for something sparkle new."

Review:  I've been gaming on computers and the Internet in some form or fashion since the late eighties.  MUD's, MOO's, MMORPG's - text-based or graphically based I've played a lot of games over the years.  I also play single-player RPG's, but I'm very picky these days about what I play.  I play games because it's fun and because gaming is one of the coolest forms of storytelling that has emerged in my lifetime.  The best games let you live inside a highly developed and often contextually changing story.  There are a few that come to mind - Bioshock, Planescape:  Torment, and Dragon Age.  All of these games me kept entertained for many many hours, enthralled by the stories they told.

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One of the best of the RPG's is the Fallout series.  Set in a post-apocalyptic America after the bombs have fallen, this series fleshes out its premise to an amazing level.  The game is huge in terms of landscape, of quests, of storylines, of possibilities that will change depending on the choices you make.  I'm currently playing Fallout New Vegas and at 124 hours of playtime I'm not even close to completing it.  Why am I talking about gaming?  It's all about the landscape.  The Reapers are the Angels reads like the landscape of Fallout feels.  Barren, but beautiful and pockmarked with survivors and mutants creating their own places in the world.  The big difference here is that rather than a nuclear apocalypse, this book is after the zombie apocalypse.

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This is one of the best novels I've read all year.  In the same way that I delighted in Let the Right One In for its creative take on the vampire novel and it's wonderful writing, The Reapers are the Angels drew me into its world in a similar way.  Just as Let the Right One In was a literary novel that had a vampire, so Reapers is a literary novel with zombies in its landscape - they're not central, it's not really about them, they're just part of the landscape and yet they define the landscape and the story.

Bits and pieces of this novel remind me of Mark Twain and, oddly, True Grit, but Reapers has its own literary sensibility.  The story of Temple, a girl who is trying to figure out her place in her world and her travels through it, Reapers elevates itself far above its genre and brings with it a multiplicity of pleasures for the reader.  You need this book.