The Reapers Are the Angels

Oct 16, 2011 karen rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: death-is-not-the-end, tastes-like-people, pretty-girls-make-graves, october-is-spooky

book two of "october is zombie month" was so much better than book one. sooo much better.

i was intrigued by this book, until i read mike reynolds' devastatingly negative review of it, and it got shunted to the mental back burner. but eventually i remembered that i am not as smart as mike reynolds, and i am content with playing with little glass paperweights refracting in the sunlight while giggling, so i read it. and i loved it.

(see, pretty!)

but it's good - i lovingly thumb my nose at the nega...more

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Mar 08, 2012 Ceridwen rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: america-and-environs, gothic, omg-were-all-going-to-die, reviewed, zombies, the-west, grrrrl-power

Cross-posted on Readerling

I think there is something like an inverse square rule at work here between one's familiarity with Southern Gothic (or Western/Appalachian morality tales more broadly) and enjoyment of this novel. Or maybe it's a bell curve, but I think there is a relationship. My knowledge of these things is limited - I had a shattering, eye-opening affair with Flannery O'Connor in my youth, and read The Road along with every other housewife on the planet, hit some of the short fiction...more Cross-posted on Readerling

I think there is something like an inverse square rule at work here between one's familiarity with Southern Gothic (or Western/Appalachian morality tales more broadly) and enjoyment of this novel. Or maybe it's a bell curve, but I think there is a relationship. My knowledge of these things is limited - I had a shattering, eye-opening affair with Flannery O'Connor in my youth, and read The Road along with every other housewife on the planet, hit some of the short fictions, but I can only cast my eyes down and mumble when it comes to Faulkner, Welty, anything else by McCarthy, et freaking cetera.

So I know the genre exists, and I can nod my head when the tropes come up - the Faulknerian idiot man-child, the Old Testament vengeance, clannish hillfolk, the echoing Southern plantation with its fragile social/racial politics, the land, the land, the la-an-and - but I'm not so familiar that I kept tying the string to the push-pins in a hundred other fictions. And this seems to be the sticking point for more genre-versed readers; the line between allusive and derivative is thin and personal. I don't know how this would read to someone who was slate-blank - and, by the by, just because this has a young adult protagonist does not mean it is a young adult novel at all; the sensibility is seriously wrong for that - but I'm guessing much at work here would perplex. So, bell curve. Maybe.

I'm using genre in its little-g sense - this isn't a Genre exercise - despite the zombies. The novel opens with Temple, a teenager who has only known a wasted, apocalyptic America, trailing her feet in the water on her lonely island. She watches the minnows play in the water like light themselves, like the trout in the stream that close McCarthy's own American end times. Then a jawless animated corpse washes up on the beach (whose head she caves with a rock she leaves as marker, his body bumping in the surf) and Temple knows it's time to move on or be overrun. She swims ashore and begins moving through a series of communities and the wild.

This is why I say it isn't genre: if you want to start nit-picking about how roads would be broken to crumble, or kudzu would have finally strangled every living thing without 25 years of human intervention, or no car would ever work, then you are in the wrong novel. This is a book that starts with, "God is a slick god. Temple knows. She knows because of all the crackerjack miracles still to be seen on this ruined globe." We are solidly on metaphysical terrain here - do not look for science in your fiction lest you disappoint yourself for no good reason. This is the South of St Flannery of the Knife. The moral's gonna hurt, and it might not even be a moral.

Temple herself is a fearsome creature, the inheritor of the character of generations of knowing, savage girls born onto dirt farms to absent mamas and even more absent fathers: the girl from True Grit, Ree from Winter's Bone (whom I only know from the movie, of course), or even Katniss Everdeen. She's comfortable, almost easy with the dead (if she could ever be said to be easy). She has a naturalist's respect for their ethical simplicity. The living are always more the puzzle, and after an incident in an itchy, confining survivor community, she becomes locked into a vengeance plot with a taciturn, honor-bound old cuss. She runs, and Lord, can she run.

The man is old enough to remember the world that was, before the dead crawled out of their graves to put the modern world down. As someone who was raised mostly parentless, feral, living in drains, I wouldn't have expected Temple to be so morally central - all these honorable and ethical knowings passing between her and the man, their truths in short, truth-felt lines to one another - but then I need to take my own advice about the metaphysical terrain. Temple is what is left when the lights go out on our civilization. She doesn't need to be taught the theology of the American landscape - that is inherent, and inheritable, in the end. She's like a child of the Reconstruction come forward, or likely she never left.

Though not written in dialect - and thank God for that - there are the dialectic cadences that worked for me, and a stripped down punctuation I thought was apt. The lack of quotation marks was especially cool, and made the care taken toward dialogue more noticeable - if you can't just throw quotes around it, you make sure it's easy to tell who is speaking. Again, I could probably just gesture to McCarthy, so derivative or allusive - that's your call. I really enjoyed this, even though it's occasionally overheated, it's sentences portentous and overmuch. But I'm a sucker for that long slow pan of the American heart and soul, the road and train and feet on the pavement. Amen. The End. (less)

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Jun 20, 2011 Wendy Darling rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: fans of the Newflesh trilogy or The Fledgling

Recommended to Wendy Darling by: Maja

Shelves: pn-zombies-biters, young-adult, adult, dystopian-post-apocalyptic-utopian, horror, read-2011, gorgeous-prose, heroines-butt-kicking, favorite-ya, favorites-all-time, 2010-favorites, ebook-egalley, western-ish, mature-ya

4.5 out of 5 stars This is a gruesome and beautiful book. This allegorical tale of a 15-year-old girl wandering a barren wasteland should not be beautiful, because she's fighting off zombies and a guy who's dead set on executing her. But it is. The writing is lush and gorgeous, the kind that makes you want to sink down and roll around in it until some small part of it is absorbed into your skin.

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Excerpt:

It was deep night when she saw it, but...more 4.5 out of 5 stars This is a gruesome and beautiful book. This allegorical tale of a 15-year-old girl wandering a barren wasteland should not be beautiful, because she's fighting off zombies and a guy who's dead set on executing her. But it is. The writing is lush and gorgeous, the kind that makes you want to sink down and roll around in it until some small part of it is absorbed into your skin.

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Excerpt:

It was deep night when she saw it, but the moon was so bright it cast hard shadows everywhere on the island...a school of tiny fish, all darting around like marbles in a chalk circle, and they were lit up electric, mostly silver but some gold and pink too. They came and danced around her ankles, and she could feel their little electric fish bodies, and it was like she was standing under the moon and in the moon at the same time.

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And that is just the first page. Six pages later, Temple stands over a zombie on a beach and crushes its skull with a huge rock. This author does not spare the terrible violence of encounters with the undead, and each confrontation is absolutely brutal and wince-inducing in its savagery. But there are some things you just have to do in order to survive.

Temple is also one of the most unforgettable fictional characters I've ever come across. She is bold, fiercely independent, and terribly damaged. Left on her own by an infected uncle and parents she doesn't remember, she encounters all kinds of people in her travels: a commune of frightened survivors, a group of men who have resorted to creative ways of finding food, a band of vicious mutants, a pitifully tragic family wasting away in their elegant manor, and a mute, helpless man she takes on against her better judgment. And of course, there's also the guy who's tracking her, hell-bent on justice because she dared to kill his brother in self-defense. It's an interesting situation when you have to fear both the living and the undead...as well as the mistakes you've made in your past.

This is a fairly short novel that is written almost like a post-apocalyptic western, but it is one that is packed with incredible power. It's been a few days since I finished reading this book, and I can't seem to forget the bleak intensity and magnificence of its imagery. I suspect that I never will.(less)

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Jun 21, 2012 Lou rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: june-read, zombies, ya, horror

A girl who’s traveled the land, her mind filled with people, sights and words, with sins and redemption. She’s only 15 and has killed many the rule is kill or be killed. A desolate land of death and zombies, she did not choose this destiny. Amongst the contagious spreading of zombies, she hides from many in the shadows and is well equipped to fight twice her size equipped with her Gurkha knife. This story is written well, a story so bleak about death and survival and love has some beautifully w...more

A girl who’s traveled the land, her mind filled with people, sights and words, with sins and redemption. She’s only 15 and has killed many the rule is kill or be killed. A desolate land of death and zombies, she did not choose this destiny. Amongst the contagious spreading of zombies, she hides from many in the shadows and is well equipped to fight twice her size equipped with her Gurkha knife. This story is written well, a story so bleak about death and survival and love has some beautifully written lines, written in eloquent prose that makes the zombie story that so much better.

The story is about death and redemption and one girl’s eventual outcome amongst so much darkness, at times heart-breaking.
The island, The Lighthouse, The Moon and The Miracle of the Fish.

"And, too, a carnival of death, a grassy park near the city center, a merry-go-round that turns unceasing hour by hour, its old-time calliope breathing out dented and rusty notes while the slugs pull their own arms out of the sockets trying to climb aboard the moving platform, some disembodied limbs dragging in the dirt around and around, hands still gripping the metal poles—and the ones who succeed and climb aboard, mounting to the top of the wooden horses, joining with the endless motion of the machine, dazed to imbecility by gut memories of speed and human ingenuity. And the horde, in the blackout of the city night, illumined only by the headlights of the car, everywhere descending and roiling against one another like maggots in the belly of a dead cat, the grimmest and most degenerate manifestation this blighted humanity on this blighted earth—beasts of our lost pasts, spilling out of whatever hell we have made for them like the army of the damned, choked and gagging and rotted and crusty and eminently pathetic, yes, brutally, conspicuously, outrageously pathetic."

The Books Behind The Reapers Are The Angels
As I suspect is true of all novels, The Reapers Are the Angels is cobbled together from the fragments of other books. Any but the most passive reader will collect certain baggage from the books he or she reads—lingering impressions that stick like burrs in the back of the brain and sometimes, especially if the reader is also a writer, plant themselves in the imagination like seeds that grow into other books entirely. For me, these influences can range from a narrative style that I wish I could emulate, to an unforgettable scene, or a perfectly written sentence, or even an ideally chosen and placed word (like the word "thrapple" in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian). For a writer, those are the things that brought you to literature in the first place—a fascination with artful storytelling—so it's not surprising that the things you admire most make their way in sometimes insidious ways into your own writing.I've heard this process referred to in a number of ways: everything from plagiarism to artful thievery to homage. But I think I like Tolstoy's metaphor best: art is a contagion. It infects you with its brilliance, and you feel inspired, however humbly, to recreate it and infect somebody else with it.

Even though it is, without question, a zombie novel, Reapers traces the source of its literary infection back to the Southern Gothic tradition and the classic stories of the American frontier. Here are some of the contagious books that have contributed to The Reapers Are the Angels.

The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner. The more I write, the more I find myself in debt to Faulkner. The unquestionable master of the Southern Gothic, Faulkner is an icon for writers because he is unafraid to go big: he does not hesitate to launch into epic considerations of good and evil, womanhood and manhood, sin and corruption, nobility and redemption. You could accuse him of being melodramatic, but in an age when so many books seem to be written in a snickering, self-deprecatory style, I personally would rather see someone err in the direction of grandiosity rather than modesty. Some small homages to Faulkner in Reapers: Temple's name, which comes from Sanctuary, and the figure of Maury, who is based upon Benjy in The Sound and the Fury. Also, the Grierson episode evokes the short story "A Rose for Emily," about a woman (Emily Grierson) who refuses to make the transition from the past to the present.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain. Reapers is structured as a classic American road novel, the form of which has its roots in Huck Finn. It is episodic, and we are drawn forward by an overdetermination of motives: an escape from whatever imprisonment is behind the hero and a pursuit of whatever freedom lies before the hero. Temple is, I think, a version of the pragmatic, earnest Huck Finn. The pseudonym she uses, Sarah Mary Williams, is the same one Huck Finn himself uses when he dressed up as a girl.

Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy. For my money, this is one of the great American books of the second half of the twentieth century. Its storyline makes it more of a Western, but its style is pure Southern Gothic. The primary conflict is between an unnamed "kid" and a man who seems echo the expansive, chatty evil of a Faustian devil. I think my character Moses is a kinder, gentler version of that antagonist. In addition, a number of the scenes of vast violence in Reapers are inspired by those from Blood Meridian, particularly the infamous Comanche attack scene.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston. You wouldn't normally associate Hurston's lovely, poetic, romantic novel with zombies—but she does tap into a folkloric kind of mysticism that has always fascinated me. My term for zombies, "meatskins," actually comes from Hurston, but she uses it simply to describe puny human beings: "meatskins dancing around the toes of time."

Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell and Smonk by Tom Franklin. These are two masters of the contemporary Southern Gothic genre. My character of Temple is inspired by the tough, relentless heroines of these two novels. Both of these authors create teenage girls who have managed to survive in brutal surroundings, who have actually grown accustomed to violence and corruption. But what both these authors admire about their characters (you can feel it in the affectionate way they write about them), is their ability to maintain a certain purity within their own individual codes. These girls survive because, even though they live on the rough and tumble margins of society, they are driven by a personal idealism that tells them what to do.

And it would be remiss of me not to mention two television shows that have contributed a great deal to Reapers: Deadwood, which is the perfect representation of a violent, blustery, and wholly beautiful frontier lifestyle, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which represents a landmark in tough, intelligent, complicated and sympathetic young female protagonists.
Alden Bell's Top Ten Zombie Movies

10. I Walked with a Zombie
Jacques Tourneur's 1943 classic illustrates the voodoo roots of zombie mythology. The stiff melodrama of this film fits perfectly with the hypnotic movements of the zombies themselves and the decaying gothic sensibility of the setting. This is a different kind of zombie: there are no half-rotted walking corpses here—only haunted figures wandering in authentically creepy trances.

9. 28 Days Later
This seems to be the movie that changed the genre. Suddenly zombies were driven by fury more than hunger, and they ran after you with surprising athleticism rather than loping with a stiff, corpse-like gait. Personally, I'm a fan of the more traditional slow zombies, but I admire this movie for the way it uses the zombie backdrop to portray a very gritty story of human frailty.

8. Night of the Living Dead
What George Romero did with this movie was show that zombies make a marvelously accommodating metaphor for whatever political, social or philosophical point you want to make. He shows us that modern zombie stories aren't, for the most part, about zombies—which is beautifully illustrated by the opening scene where the zombie doesn't jump out at you but lingers, unfocussed, in the background for quite a while.

7. Zombieland
I love this movie partly because it is reminiscent of Dawn of the Dead in its playful fascination with post-apocalyptic landscapes but also because it features a cast of characters all of whom have already learned to be survivors. Whether through brutality or trickery or avoidance, these characters have learned to live in the midst of a zombie infestation—and their masterful handling of a blighted world is deeply satisfying to watch.

6. Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn
I have no excuse for this one. I saw it as a kid and thought it was the height of wit. How could the movie be so irreverent to something as deadly serious as flesh-eating zombies? It was my Noel Coward. As a teenager, I had the movie poster fixed permanently above my bed. A grinning skull gazing at you with a sly sideways glance.

5. American Zombie
A brilliant faux documentary about the marginalized population of zombies living on the fringes of Los Angeles. This movie does more than any other to humanize zombies—even turning them into an oppressed yet articulate minority. Understated and surprisingly touching.

4. Re-Animator
I don't know if this exactly qualifies as a zombie movie, but I love it anyway. It delights in its perverse grossness, and it hearkens back (in a mostly sincere way, despite the number of viewers who like to see it as campy) to old fashioned mad scientist tales.

3. Cemetery Man
This underrated 1994 movie, featuring Rupert Everett as a cemetery keeper who has a problem with the dead returning to life, has some of the most wonderfully absurd incarnations of zombie mythology, including a troop of zombie boy scouts, a zombie motorcyclist, and a zombie bride who is no more than a head. Plus, it features the classic line, uttered by the vivacious Anna Fulchi, “You know, you've got a real nice ossuary.” Yes, the movie wants to be a hundred different movies at once. Yes, the special effects are clumsy and the humor broad. But, curiously enough, it's also a deeply cerebral study of life circumscribed by death.

2. Dead Alive (also called Braindead)
When this first came out, it was lauded as the most gory movie every made. I don't know how such things are measured, but it would certainly take some effort to find a movie more stomach-churning than this one. Priding itself on bizarre dark humor and innovative ways to be killed, the movie is great because of its unabashed Freudian subplot. Leave it to Peter Jackson to combine a zombie slaughter-fest with the psychological trauma of a severe Oedipal complex.

1. Dawn of the Dead
For me, this is the archetype, this is where it all began. I remember watching it in complete wonder at all the curious reversals: the portrayal of the zombies as sad and rather pathetic background figures, the fixation on the technical logistics of survival (how much time is spent on showing how the survivors fortify and clean up that shopping mall?), the implication that humans are a far greater threat than zombies, the lack of a beginning or ending (the feeling that the movie is all middle), the portrayal of the loneliness and boredom and downright normalization of life in a post-apocalyptic world. And this, ultimately, is what makes the film so unique: where other movies in the genre do everything in their power to show how different and strange the zombie apocalypse is, Romero focuses on how familiar it Can be.
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Dec 31, 2012 Nancy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Nancy by: Megan

Shelves: zombies, sf-fantasy, post-apocalyptic-dystopia

I’m glad I read Megan's review, or I might have overlooked this slim but very satisfying post-apocalyptic story.

If you are looking for thrills, mad and ravenous zombies, and intense gore, look elsewhere. You won’t find it here. Not that there isn’t violence or zombies, it’s just that they don’t overpower the story.

Without family or a place to live, 15-year-old Temple wanders around a bleak and barren landscape ravaged by zombies. Many of the human survivors live in groups, sheltering themselve...more

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Feb 12, 2013 Jeffrey Keeten rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The field is the world; the good seed are the children of
the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the
wicked one;
The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the
end of the world; and the reapers are the angels.
As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire;
so shall it be the end of this world.

There are people who are not going to read this book just because they don’t read books with zombies. They may not read it because it is horror, fearing that they will be expos...more

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Dec 04, 2012 Carol rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: zombie fans, apocalypse fiction fans

Recommended to Carol by: Trudi

Shelves: apocalypse, zombies, female-lead, friend-recommended, should-buy

Would it be a stretch to call it a Faulkner-esque zombie tale?

From the start, Reapers quickly distinguishes itself in the zombie apocalypse genre. Temple, our heroine, has found herself a deserted lighthouse when she experiences the miracle of the fishes.

"She left the lighthouse and went down to the beach to look at the moon pure and straight, and she stood in the shallows and let her feet sink into the sand as the patter-waves tickled her ankles. And that's when she saw it, a school of tiny fi...more Would it be a stretch to call it a Faulkner-esque zombie tale?

From the start, Reapers quickly distinguishes itself in the zombie apocalypse genre. Temple, our heroine, has found herself a deserted lighthouse when she experiences the miracle of the fishes.

"She left the lighthouse and went down to the beach to look at the moon pure and straight, and she stood in the shallows and let her feet sink into the sand as the patter-waves tickled her ankles. And that's when she saw it, a school of tiny fish, all darting around like marbles in a chalk circle, and they were lit up electric, mostly silver but some gold and pink too. They came and danced around her ankles, and she could feel there little electric fish bodies, and it was like she was standing under the moon and in the moon at the same time."

Temple has learned, you see, that "God is a slick god" and that there are still miracles to be found in the world. She was born since the world changed and though she feels she has darkness in her past, the new world is kind of beautiful. It is an unusual perspective in apocalypse fiction, a genre which is usually preoccupied with the horrific: the decline of civilization, the inhumanity of man, the bleakness of mere survival and the rise of the living dead. But the dead are just another kind of predator here. It is what it is, and zombies gotta do what they gotta do--behavior that is no worse than lions or wolves preying on the edges of the herd.

Our savvy and skilled heroine is delightfully self confident; she has no need to plan ahead for protection because she is so capable of coping with whatever comes. A zombie on her beach is a sign that tides and seasons will change access to her refuge. Confidently, without bravado, she leaves the lighthouse to head north, looking to see some sights. Unfortunately, in a group of city buildings taken over by survivors, she attracts the attention of the creepiest sort of guy. He tries a sneak attack, she kicks ass and soon his brother is tracking her, straight out of revenge fiction. She sees the fight as another sign of her general incompatibility with civilization, and decides to head north again. Brother follows her. On the way, she finds herself in an unaccustomed moment of pity and saves ~~Lenny~~ a mentally challenged man with a pack of zombies trailing behind him. Having him in tow brings up a host of memories, and gives an opportunity to learn more about Temple's past. As the book progresses, she continues to encounter a variety of situations that reflect the range of humanity's adaptation skills, and its worth noting the Bell's vision of the world does not entail humanity degenerating into Lord of the Flies (although I suspect we meet Miss Havisham).

The tone throughout is remarkable. It's hard to encapsulate what about this book stood out for me, but part was the easy, factual tone, a sort of emotionally removed description that acknowledges horror but also contains beauty. It's notable to find a heroine with a Zen state of being, general optimism, and lack of fear. Narration is in her inner 'voice;' while clearly undereducated, there is still subtlety of thought that lends subtext to her experiences. The narration highlights the changes in the world while giving her a sort of innocence.

A few comments on plotting that contain spoilers: (view spoiler)(less)

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Aug 07, 2011 Tatiana rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: those looking for a different zombie story, with a philosophical flavor

Recommended to Tatiana by: Megan

Shelves: 2011, dystopias-post-apocalyptic

I just finished reading probably a couple of dozens of the book's reviews and feel like there is hardly anything left to add. Except maybe that The Reapers Are the Angels is one of the very few zombie books I have ever finished and pretty much the only zombie book that I finished with pleasure and emotional involvement. Most likely because this novel isn't really about zombies. It is about us, people, whose conscience (and not external circumstances) often is our most dangerous and relentless en...more I just finished reading probably a couple of dozens of the book's reviews and feel like there is hardly anything left to add. Except maybe that The Reapers Are the Angels is one of the very few zombie books I have ever finished and pretty much the only zombie book that I finished with pleasure and emotional involvement. Most likely because this novel isn't really about zombies. It is about us, people, whose conscience (and not external circumstances) often is our most dangerous and relentless enemy.

In The Road-like fashion (I have to say, Alden Bell was undoubtedly very heavily and obviously inspired by Cormac McCarthy's works), the post-apocalyptic setting is nothing but a backdrop for exploring the matters of human soul. Bell doesn't dwell on detailing his world, and correctly so. Some authors (Lauren DeStefano in Wither, for instance) make a mistake of over-explaining things when they don't need to. And Bell doesn't need to tell us how this zombie business works. Because for his main character, 15-year old Temple, zombies are the least of her problems. For Temple, they are a part of the natural environment, like, let's say, animals. Survival in this infested world is easy, dealing with what is inside her mind and heart - guilt, doubt, loneliness - that is hard.

Others have already said it, Temple is the one who carries this novel. She is a remarkably well realized character. She is self-sufficient, strong, capable, caring, and honorable, but with a gaping hole in her soul. I dare you not to empathize with her and her search for self-forgiveness and sense of belonging. Does she find it? I wished for a different ending, I won't lie.

There are still some lingering questions that I haven't found the answers to, even after reading other reviewers' opinions about the novel. I never quite understood the main antagonist, Moses. Is he another lost soul looking for a purpose and who finds a very strange one? His vendetta is so... pointless. Your thoughts are very welcome.(less)

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May 26, 2012 Michelle, the Bookshelf Stalker rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

AH and Regina did an excellent review of this book here...

http://badassbookreviews.com/review-t...

or you can read my much less exciting review below...

4.5 stars out of 5

If you could take all the strong, fearless, intelligent, compassionate female characters from all the books you have read, you'll come close to Temple's character.

If you take all the screwed up, guilt ridden, angry, sad female characters from the books you have read, you'll come close to Temple's character.

Temple will go down as...more

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Jun 27, 2011 Trudi rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: zombies, apocalyptic-types, love-the-title, 2011-reads, survive-this, uber-graphic-extreme, prose-that-sings, books-i-want-to-marry, kick-ass-heroines, my-desert-island, infection, science-fiction, modern-lit

Alden Bell proves that the literary zombie novel is not an oxymoron. Review to follow.

About zombies, you can say I’m … earnest. I love how they can be so many different things at once – pathetic, savage, terrifying, unrelenting. Zombies are shambling and starving, haunted and lost. They ramble and feed, yet there is a hint, always just a hint, of some long lost memory of who they used to be. Nothing captures that better than the scene from Romero’s 1978 Dawn of the Dead when the zombies come in...more Alden Bell proves that the literary zombie novel is not an oxymoron. Review to follow.

About zombies, you can say I’m … earnest. I love how they can be so many different things at once – pathetic, savage, terrifying, unrelenting. Zombies are shambling and starving, haunted and lost. They ramble and feed, yet there is a hint, always just a hint, of some long lost memory of who they used to be. Nothing captures that better than the scene from Romero’s 1978 Dawn of the Dead when the zombies come in waves to the mall – “Why do they come here?” “Some kind of instinct. Memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.”

More than anything else, I love what zombies can teach us about ourselves because surviving a zombie apocalypse is going to cost you: your soul, your sanity, your faith, your humanity. Like any zombie story worth its salt, The Reapers are the Angels is not about the zombies. It’s about the survivors -- the ones left hanging on by their fingertips to the jagged edges of a dying world that just won’t die and stay dead. A world that shifts and groans under the weight of biting, grasping corpses.

Temple knows this world. She’s been hanging on by her fingertips to the jagged edges for ten years, since her orphanage was overrun when she was five years old. Now she is fifteen, fierce and feral. She might long for human connections and to find her place in the world, but the basics of human interaction and social etiquettes have passed her by. What she knows is survival at any cost, and it has cost her plenty. She can’t help but think: “I got a devil in me.”But Temple’s not a monster. Even as he hunts her across the country, Moses Todd explains: “I’ve seen evil, girl, and you ain’t it”. This is a redemption story, because really, that is what Temple seeks even though she cannot articulate that basic human need in herself, for forgiveness, for someone to lay their hands on her and tell her she’s just a girl after all, and not an abomination.

I love the title of this book – there is something so poetic, so portent, so Old Testament medieval about it. The Reapers are the Angels … yes, I want to read that book. I want to know what that means. Alden Bell delivers prose to match that is so achingly beautiful in its stream-of-consciousness style. I love the heavy Southern dialect that’s been bastardized by time and trauma.

You give me a compass that tells good from bad, and boy I’ll be a soldier of the righteous truth. But them two things are a slippery business, and tellin them apart might as well be a blind man’s guess.

This is a short novel that manages to be epic in its themes and scope, all at once horrific, heartbreaking and rife with tragedy. The violence is explicit but even as the blood and stinking offal pour across the page the book’s magnitude and terrible beauty is never in dispute. Alden Bell is writing Southern Gothic set in a landscape where things are not “gross” but rather “grotesque”. (view spoiler)

What more can I say? Read this book.

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Aug 12, 2011 Lisa O. rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

The Reapers are the Angels is one of those books which I find extremely difficult to review because whatever I might say about it, it is never enough and it sounds banal.

Right from page 1, it was clear to me that this book stands in a category of its own in respect to YA lit - but then, can it even be considered YA lit? One sure thing I can say is that this is literature.
In fact, one of the traits which make this book really stand out is certainly the quality of its writing: metaphorical, evocat...more

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Aug 20, 2011 Jo rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: gorgeous-prose, good-grief, things-are-rotten-in-the-state-of-d, soul-sister-heroine, ya, you-got-a-friend-in-me, e

This is probably going to be the vaguest, wishy-washiest review I’ve written. But I find that it’s imperative not to go into too much detail with this one. If you’ve read it or when you’ve read it, you’ll probably understand why I’m reluctant to go into too much detail. This book asks a lot of questions and doesn’t offer a lot of answers… and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Books are supposed to make you think and this one certainly does.
If you do want a crack at some answers Lisa and Catie ...more

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May 26, 2011 Maja rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobooks, favorites, zombies-zombies-everywhere, post-apocalyptic, books-that-changed-me, made-me-cry, never-saw-it-coming, role-models, amazing-writing, reviewed-in-2011, own-a-dtb

The harvest is the end of this world,
and the reapers are the angels.

I've read countless books in my life and through them I've been introduced to literally thousands of characters. Some of them I forgot almost instantly. Others I need to be reminded of and even then remember only faintly. Then there are some I remember clearly because a part of them was important to me. But there is also a very small number of characters that stay with me always, characters that follow me around like shadows......more The harvest is the end of this world,
and the reapers are the angels.

I've read countless books in my life and through them I've been introduced to literally thousands of characters. Some of them I forgot almost instantly. Others I need to be reminded of and even then remember only faintly. Then there are some I remember clearly because a part of them was important to me. But there is also a very small number of characters that stay with me always, characters that follow me around like shadows... shadows that once taught me an important lesson I'll never forget. One of them is Stephen King's Dolores Claiborne. Alden Bell's Temple is another.

This woman, this young girl, this child, is sixteen characters folded into one, and yet on the surface she is as simple as a girl can be. She is a character that makes your heart ache and your head spin. She is someone you have no choice but to love... someone you'll do your best to understand... someone you'll always want to be.

At first I was expecting a paranormal YA novel... I didn't read any of the reviews and I guess I just made a stupid assumption. Temple IS fifteen years old and the book really HAS zombies, but that's where the similarities with all the novels we usually read end. The Reapers Are the Angels is NOT a YA novel! It's post-apocalyptic fiction at its best. Actually, it's not a novel that people under the age of 18 should read. It has violence, sex and more violence and it's scary and horrible at times. But it is also wonderful and deep and mature and not to be taken lightly at all. The psychological developement of Bell's characters is astonishing, almost incredible.

If you have a strong stomach and you want to take a break from all the predictable fiction that surrounds us, The Reapers Are the Angels might be the novel for you. It doesn't follow any rules, it will make you skip dinner, and it will definitely make you cry. But most of all, it will surprise you with its simplicity and its depth and it will probably teach you a thing or two about yourself... and about who you want to be when world as we know it comes to an end.

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Alden Bell's gorgeously written and bloody tale, which mutates from a zombie story into something of beauty and meaning. . . . Bell clearly owes great literary debt to Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" and the Southern Gothic school of Faulkner and O'Connor, but The Reapers Are the Angels shows the reader that they need not settle for mere blood 'n' guts when horror tales can, and should, go many extra miles.
—Sarah Weinman, Summer Reading Pick, Salon.com(less)

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Feb 18, 2013 Bennet rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novels-stories

She turns her back on the lost and the dead and the trampled down, she leaves them to their airy graves, and she and the big man next to her look upward at heaven and find there not just gates and angels but other wonders too, like airplanes that go faster than sound and statues taller than any man and waterfalls taller than any statue and buildings taller than any waterfall and stories taller still that reach up and hook you by the britches on the cusp of the moon, where you can look and see t

...more

She turns her back on the lost and the dead and the trampled down, she leaves them to their airy graves, and she and the big man next to her look upward at heaven and find there not just gates and angels but other wonders too, like airplanes that go faster than sound and statues taller than any man and waterfalls taller than any statue and buildings taller than any waterfall and stories taller still that reach up and hook you by the britches on the cusp of the moon, where you can look and see the earth whole, and you can see how silly and precious a little marble it really is after all.

(I just happened to reread that passage and had to add it because I love it so much.)

Wow. Has the telling of the zombie apocalypse evolved from comic book to literature, because this reads like literature, like Southern lit, like if Kaye Gibbons or Daniel Woodrell did horror, and maybe that's what we have here, a Kaye Gibbons or Daniel Woodrell of horror named Alden Bell.

It's 25 years into the change, and zombies have become a kind of slug in the global ecology. That's what they're called, slugs, but with deadly appetites. Because slugs are slow and weak the survivors have gotten pretty good at maneuvering around them, but there's a startling encounter with a sentient and strapping variety -- monsters being crafted from obscure medical experiments involving isolated and inbred rednecks. Sounds outrageous and is, but it is literary even so, and among other things that means well written.

I loved the story, ate it up, pardon the pun, my sole complaint being that the protagonist should have been a reader. The omniscient narrator mostly takes her perspective, and the voice of this 15-year-old illiterate orphan called Temple and raised almost entirely by her own wits is one irresistible turn of phrase after another in a dialect that is hers alone, but how she manages such complex and creative ruminations and expressions is a mystery. She's damn clever and has an exceptional memory and is perhaps drawing on all the words and ideas she's heard, some of which she gets wrong, like "aerodynastics," but she's a loner whose revealed encounters are rarely intellectually or emotionally edifying. I enjoyed the read so much that this feels like quibbling and is not costing any stars, but I think the story would be even better if Temple's time in the orphanage had provided some semblance of an education, at least enough to make her a reader.

Otherwise it's seamless, and nothing about the literary slights the horror, which is graphic without being sensationalized, which makes it feel more real and intense. I always read before falling asleep, and this gave me nightmares. With the exception of Lovecraft's, no other stories have done that.

Here's a taste:

She is as close to a monster as God allows, Temple reckons. The woman is massive, even larger than the others, maybe ten feet if taken at her full height instead of stretched out on a mountain of pillows in the middle of the room. She is naked, but her nakedness doesn't count for anything because of the bony plates that cover almost her entire body, as though her skeleton had melted away and been reformed on the outside of her. Her voice is low, almost a man's voice, those oversized vocal cords delivering nothing but bass notes from her gullet, and her rasping breath turns her attempts at sweetness grotesque. They call her Mama, and Temple wonders how many of them she is actual mother to -- and it wouldn't surprise her if it was all of them, because Temple can see she's a world Mama, like the earth itself . . . 'You got a mama, honey?' she says, turning her attention to Temple. 'Do you miss your mama, honey ... Do you like our family?'

'Sure,' Temple says. 'In particular I like the way you keep people locked in basements.'

The woman's face contorts into an angry frown, but just for a moment before she closes her eyes and collects herself and begins to explain something . . . By the end of her speech the woman is worked up, and she has snailed across the floor until she is right close to Temple's face, her breath coming hot and powerful on her cheeks. Then she leans back, pulling herself together once more. She sips lemonade, her bones clacking. 'See,' she goes on, 'this plague is sent to cleanse the earth. It sweeps with prejudice, honey, and it favors those strong enough to keep together. What is does, it sweeps away the mess of commonness and what it leaves behind are those Americans who keep America stored up in their blood lineage. We got us the blood of the nation, you'd better believe it.'

Highly recommended, but not before sleeping unless you're up for being trapped by the likes of that matriarch in the worst of bad dreams.

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Dec 28, 2011 Greta is Erikasbuddy rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book was most awesometasticla!!

You know those books that want to ROMANTICIZE every last thing down to the very last lint ball? Sometimes those things drive me insane. Sometimes I just want a story... TOLD LIKE A STORY!!

Well buddy, I got it with THE REAPERS ARE THE ANGELS.

I don't know if it's because it was told by a man, or maybe because it's told in 3rd person, but it was told right. I never got board. And I never once thought these two or that two or those three were going to fall in love...more

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Mar 02, 2013 Terry rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: horror, post-apocalypse

3.5 – 4 stars

Well, I gotta say I didn't expect that ending.

_The Reapers are the Angels_ is my first foray into the très au courant genre of zombie apocalypse. It was a fortunate choice and I can only hope I enjoy other forays into the genre as much. One thing I can say is that it’s definitely a real page-turner . The story of Temple, the young bad-ass action-grrl born into a world after the rise of the undead, is compelling and engrossing and has definitely got velocity. Temple herself is intere...more 3.5 – 4 stars

Well, I gotta say I didn't expect that ending.

_The Reapers are the Angels_ is my first foray into the très au courant genre of zombie apocalypse. It was a fortunate choice and I can only hope I enjoy other forays into the genre as much. One thing I can say is that it’s definitely a real page-turner . The story of Temple, the young bad-ass action-grrl born into a world after the rise of the undead, is compelling and engrossing and has definitely got velocity. Temple herself is interesting, a strangely positive girl despite the darkness of her past and the violence of both her world and her deeper character. She's a strange oxymoron, an optimist who seethes under the surface with supressed rage. I suppose she could be seen as yet another product of the Buffy/Katniss/whatever-action-grrl-of-the-moment template, but I thought she generally came across as being much more real than that stereotype would imply. She may be a warrior princess of sorts, but Temple has a certain naïve charm that sets her apart and she rarely goes looking for trouble, though of course it often finds her. Temple is also interesting in that she was born into the world of the apocalypse, so the status quo doesn’t disturb her in the same way as it does the survivors from the old time. She doesn’t see the world as a punishment and a curse, but rather as a gift. She sees the hand of God in everything and even the fact of the shambling dead is a miracle when you look at it from the right angle. It’s an interesting perspective however off-the-wall it might seem.

The other major element of the novel is its prose. The southern twang that nearly drips off the page is a joy to read and makes the novel seem, on the one hand, very literary. Yet there was another element to it that kept breaking through in the back of my mind and which occasionally broke the spell of the prose itself: this is also a novel that very much reads as though it were written with the cinematic version strongly in mind. At times it is almost like a movie treatment for the soon-to-be-produced vehicle starring the next Jennifer Lawrence as Temple (maybe Chloe Moretz? She’s young enough and certainly her stint as Hitgirl in ‘Kickass’ gives her some of the required experience in extreme violence). This isn’t exactly a bad thing, I guess, and the author is welcome to any income he can derive from his work, but it was a little distracting sometimes to think “ah yes, I can just see the dollar signs in the author’s eyes as he wrote this scene just for the big screen.” Unfair of me maybe, I don’t know, but it was a feeling I definitely got from time to time while reading. That said, this is still a great novel to read and it’s simply filled with the poetic palaver of the South so mellifluous to Northern ears.

Aside from being both a quest road-trip and the story of a young girl (who’s really more of an adult in all but the most literal temporal sense) coping with her past as she faces her future it is also, as others have pointed out, definitely a story about the American landscape. It’s a blasted and decayed landscape, but one where the character of its past still shines through in what remains. Ironically it seems to be those who are most willing to let go of this geographical memory that are most likely to succeed in this new world as opposed to the hopeless dreamers trying to claw their way back to the world of civilization and who pretend that their little enclaves of the old world are anything other than a fantasy.

I’ll conclude by saying that Alden Bell also did a great job of building up his characters and even those who had little more than a walk-on were generally interesting and unique. A shout-out has to go to Moses Todd one of the better villains (or perhaps I really ought to call him an antagonist) I’ve come across in awhile. He’s nearly as compelling as Temple and seeing the two of them together was nearly always a treat. I’m surprised to see this listed as book one in a series, but I’m willing to go along with Bell in his further forays across the twisted landscape of undead America.(less)

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Apr 29, 2013 Suzanne rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Suzanne by: Bennet's review

I was surprised earlier this year to see a beautiful 5-star review for this book from Bennet. But knowing her to be a reader and reviewer of sophistication and exquisite taste, I allowed for the fact that I could be missing something here and should set aside my prejudices to explore that possibility. I’m so glad I did. I have always believed genuine quality transcends genre. I cannot stand country music, for instance, but I can listen to Patsy Cline all day long. Sports bore me silly, but a vid...more

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Jan 30, 2012 Alicia rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: zombies, caused-me-rage, ugh-young-adult, wtf-is-this, lurking-pedobear, trees-died-for-this-crap, judging-you, me-and-ranty-mcgee, drank-the-haterade, rapey

From the beginning this reads like an author trying desperately to write an intelligent and literary young adult book. If only the execution had worked. It read like a clumsy attempt at so-called beautiful writing in that way where you're envisioning the people who write with a Thesaurus open on their lap and change every other word to make their writing something it's not.

The story was weighed down by the purple prose. It was a clunky read, only made worse by the "style" the author adopted in...more From the beginning this reads like an author trying desperately to write an intelligent and literary young adult book. If only the execution had worked. It read like a clumsy attempt at so-called beautiful writing in that way where you're envisioning the people who write with a Thesaurus open on their lap and change every other word to make their writing something it's not.

The story was weighed down by the purple prose. It was a clunky read, only made worse by the "style" the author adopted in which those pesky quotation marks really only get in the way of dialogue. So the reader must wade through the excessive, flowery writing only to be taken further out of the story by having to figure out if the characters are talking to each other or if the protagonist, Temple, is thinking/talking to herself.

Yet, in all of this, attention to detail was lost. This is set some 25 years after the zombie apocalypse. Nevertheless, Temple is able to find gasoline at gas stations? And there is still running electricity? There was a lot of basic science that was ignored in this book.

Early in the story the blaring lights of a nearby city prompted Temple to investigate and she found a well-formed society of survivors that welcomed her. Of course, safety and comfort are not meant to be and soon she is on the run again only now she has a man, Moses, chasing after her (view spoiler). These are the way things go in a dystopian society. But I was still enraged by the way the other adults simply shrugged at what happened. And found no real problem with this grown man's grudge against a child.

There is nothing really wrong with Temple herself. She is 15-years-old, has lost everyone who meant anything to her, and is imbued with the fierceness one must have to survive in the zombie apocalypse. The biggest issue I had with her were the names she called a companion she picked up along the way. Although, her actions after she had to flee the first group – (view spoiler) – had me screaming, "Oh, my God, what is wrong with you?!"

On the run from her stalker she ends up in yet another unlikely situation. This was my breaking point. Already frustrated by the writing, grammar, and ridiculous plot elements we're hit with Temple (view spoiler).

I don't care what kind of society I'm reading about, that will never be okay with me. I'm sure it's fine for many people, since we seem to live in a time where "young adult" really means "children characters in adult stories." That's simply not how I roll.

So here is where I parted ways with this book. I did go looking for a synopsis of the story to see what happens and I was incredibly happy that I did give up on it. She ends up in one unlikely and ridiculous scenario after another (and keep in mind this is a zombie book, so it broke my already suspended belief). And the ending, especially Moses's over-wrought philosophical view of what had occurred, would have had me tearing my hair out.(less)

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Feb 16, 2013 Jonfaith rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Jonfaith by: Jeffrey Keeten

Katniss Everdeen apparently became lost while bow-hunting in what passes for YA Dystopia. She quickly found herself in a global charnel house, a dread zone, while trekking up a I-90 ravaged by the walking dead. Before she can mutter poppenjay, she's become a real killing machine, as opposed to the bloodless slaughter of the Volturi. Ree emerges gore-spattered and prone to psychotic rages. Transformed and seeking atonement, Bella is saddled with Lennie Small as they attempt to outwit Anton Chigur...more

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Jun 27, 2011 Karen rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011, specfic

I almost completely loved this. A talented, literate writer doing a post-apocalyptic zombie novel with plot, action, and a kick-ass 15 year-old girl protagonist. Some really beautiful language, elevating some grotesque zombie business to a kind of Resident-Evil-meets-The-Stand-meets-Cormac-McCarthy-meets-Faulkner. The ending bugged a bit, but that's not much of a quarrel. This is what The Passage should have been, and wasn't.

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Sep 19, 2011 Eddie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A 3.5 rounded up to a 4-star

I've really been blank for reviews on previous books I've finished and
I'm not sure why. Maybe just the lack of confidence to write one. I've said this before, but I read other peoples' reviews and am blown away on what a wonderful job that most write up. But maybe it's just a matter of practicing, right? So, Eddie, lets not be lazy and take a crack at this one...

OK, this was my first trip down zombie(meatskins, as said in this book) lane and it was trip I'd probably...more

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May 22, 2012 Elle rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: vampires-zombies-etc, end-of-the-world

Reviews seem to go back and forth on whether or not this is actually a YA novel, so I thought I'd give this a shot despite not being a fan of YA in the slightest. Now that I'm finished, I'm going to vote that it might as well be. Outsider badass girl protagonist? Try-hard purple prose? I'm sure I would've loved this as a teenager.

To be fair, the first few chapters pulled me in. I wanted to like this, really. I've yet to find a good post-apocalyptic novel with good female characters. This book pr...more Reviews seem to go back and forth on whether or not this is actually a YA novel, so I thought I'd give this a shot despite not being a fan of YA in the slightest. Now that I'm finished, I'm going to vote that it might as well be. Outsider badass girl protagonist? Try-hard purple prose? I'm sure I would've loved this as a teenager.

To be fair, the first few chapters pulled me in. I wanted to like this, really. I've yet to find a good post-apocalyptic novel with good female characters. This book promised that, plus a change from the typical urban setting. Unfortunately, there are a few issues:

(view spoiler)

I know I'm tearing into this book more than it deserves, probably. It was just so disappointing after how much I enjoyed the opening chapters.(less)

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Jul 13, 2012 Neyra rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: dystopia

Actual Rating: 3.5

Let me begin by saying, this book was not what I was expecting. I found that I wasn't over-excited to hurry and finish so I could find out what happens. It was more like I couldn't wait to find something else to do. In other words, it was a slow read for me. What I found though, I didn't hate the book.

The Reapers Are the Angels, tells us a compelling story about survival through the eyes of fifteen year old Temple. Alone in the world after a tragedy struck, she travels the dec...more Actual Rating: 3.5

Let me begin by saying, this book was not what I was expecting. I found that I wasn't over-excited to hurry and finish so I could find out what happens. It was more like I couldn't wait to find something else to do. In other words, it was a slow read for me. What I found though, I didn't hate the book.

The Reapers Are the Angels, tells us a compelling story about survival through the eyes of fifteen year old Temple. Alone in the world after a tragedy struck, she travels the decaying world seeking only ways of surviving. For Temple, there never was "a time before the zombies", so she knows not of the ways of generations past. For her, zombies are as normal as birds flying. I found that I really liked Temple, she's a strong, resourceful and fiercely independent young woman who's just as flawed as any human being. And just like everyone, she's got demons she'd rather not acknowledge. Her personal journey takes her to others, communities of people bent on rebuilding their world, hunters roaming the lands and finding, special ways of surving, and a family lost in their own world, refusing to accept anything beyond the perimeters of their property. But growing up in a world where the dead are living and the living dead, Temple knows it's best to keep moving and not look back.

This book was more spiritual, than urban fantasy. It was a story of survival and redemption, there's zombies and an apocalyptic world, but that's just background noise... and that's where I hit a road block in my reading. I couldn't get past that, the story itself is amazing, Alden Bell does a great job in painting this dying world, and the characters are so vivid and real. The actions Temple takes in order to survive, so gruesome, violent, horrific, and cringe inducing. It was less fantasy and more realism, and honestly I'm not use to these type of books. I gravitate more towards paranormal romances, urban fantasy books, where the line between real and fiction isn't blurred.I will say, though, that the ending was a shock ;)

The book, I recommend to anyone who's interests are that of realistic fiction. It's not bad, I've read great reviews about it, and a Goodreads friend of mine highly recommended it.. Believe me when I say, it's not the book, it's me. Lol :](less)

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Apr 11, 2011 Michele Lee rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011, horror-suspense, wishlist, favorites, reviewed

The Reapers are the Angel is one of those books that people aren't going to expect, and that many otherwise avid horror fans might end up over looking. A gothic southern tale of a girl who lives alone after the zombie uprising it does for zombies what Interview with a Vampire did for vampires.
Temple is barely a teenager, left to survive in a failing world. She's illiterate, had never know family or a world without zombies yet she's searching the world for something she can't put a name to. Desp...more

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Sep 15, 2011 drey rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2010-reads, dystopia

The world has gone to heck in a handbasket, and fifteen-year-old Temple has to leave her pretty little lighthouse because it's not going to be safe for much longer, especially since the meatskins--that's what the zombies are called in this offering from Alden Bell--have managed to get to it. So she takes off to see what else is out there. Other than meatskins, that is...

Then she finds a group of people holed up in a city. A group trying to take things back from the meatskins, and keep civilizati...more

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Feb 03, 2013 Steve Aryan rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Zombies, much like vampires in recent years, have seen a resurgence in TV, film, novels and comics. Therefore finding something new and interesting can seem like an impossible task, but Alden Bell has accomplished it with style. The story takes place after a zombie apocalypse, and the closest story it resembles to me is The Walking Dead, a long running comic series from Image, which is currently being made into a TV series by Frank Darabont. Unlike The Walking Dead, the world has been like this...more Zombies, much like vampires in recent years, have seen a resurgence in TV, film, novels and comics. Therefore finding something new and interesting can seem like an impossible task, but Alden Bell has accomplished it with style. The story takes place after a zombie apocalypse, and the closest story it resembles to me is The Walking Dead, a long running comic series from Image, which is currently being made into a TV series by Frank Darabont. Unlike The Walking Dead, the world has been like this for 25 years and the main character, Temple, is a teenager, so this is all she has ever known, which makes for an interesting and unique perspective. Enough time has also passed that humanity has clawed back small portions of the land, barricaded sections of cities and small communities, but Temple is a traveller. When she was younger she tried the sedentary life, with something resembling a normal life, but the inevitable happened and staying on the move seems safer. She’s spent so long living with a shadow at her back that it has irreversibly changed her into an older, more brutal version of the girl she might have been if she had been born many years before the fall. The most poignant example of this divergence comes when she meets someone her own age who has grown up in a fenced community and the differences between them are shocking, touching and very telling.

The story follows Temple’s journey across this rugged new version of America, where the wolves lurking at your eye corners are now shambling zombies or meatskins as Bell names them. Creatures driven by primal urges and instinct, to be dealt with if required but also pitied because of what they have become and who they used to be. In many ways the story is not about zombies at all, but humanity, how it adapts and copes with adversity and how, even in an utterly ruined world, the greatest threat to an individual comes from their fellow man.

The Reapers are the Angels has strong echoes of I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, in the haunting beauty of the story and the horrific turn of events that come out of the blue. Temple, like Neville, is driven by demons in her past which are gradually revealed as the story progresses. These terrifying and crippling memories are another spur that keep her on the move, forever in search of something intangible, a refuge from the madness and even from herself. They eat away at her and she believes she doesn’t deserve a comfortable life and that she will never be forgiven by God for what she’s done. When the story begins she is at peace, living a very simple and isolated life, but she cannot hide from the world forever, or from herself, and unfortunately the world catches up and she is forced to move on.

Temple does whatever she has to in order to survive; scavenging food, weapons, cars and gas to stay on the move, killing meatskins and finding safe places to sleep at night to avoid being bitten and turned. This is a hard life that would take its toll on anyone and on a young girl surviving by herself it has many effects that most people can’t see and don’t understand.

The main relationship in the story is a complex one between Temple and a man named Moses Todd, who is in fact her worst enemy. Both of them live by a code, a set of rules in a world without laws, and when Temple breaks one of Moses rules, he becomes her implacable nemesis. At the same time he is not driven by anger, because he understands why she committed this crime, as he sees it, but if he lets it slide, if he ignores it then he might as well not bother with any rules and live like a savage. There has to be a line somewhere and she accepts it and doesn’t hate Moses either. So he swears to pursue her to the ends of the earth and kill her for what she has done and that decision makes sense to both of them. Moses is also the only person who understands Temple because he is a survivor like her, one who has spent more time on the road that sat still in one of the new communities. It is a fascinating and very unusual relationship, but one that somehow makes sense in a world gone mad. In different circumstances they could be friends or allies, but there’s no going back and no pretending in this world. They accept the truth and the world as they find it now and get on with it.

For all the walking dead, the murder, destruction and desolation, there is beauty in this shattered world. Real joy and brief moments of peace for Temple come in finding something amazing amidst the horror, which to her, means that God is still there watching over everyone. He shows wonderful things to those who keep looking and keep believing, but it also means he is still judging everyone by their actions, which is the splinter in her mind that can never be removed.

Another fascinating element in the story is what has managed to survive the fall and the passage of twenty five years. Music, literature, technology, art, history, much of it is now obsolete or irrelevant to most people. Entertainment still exists in the communities and even on the road, but it too has morphed into something else. With no TV or radio broadcasts Temple makes her own music, half remembered tunes passed down orally or mangled versions of real songs that have changed over the years as if passed through a meat grinder.

The style of the text is simple, clean and unpretentious and the story moves along at a solid pace. There are some quiet moments of contemplation, lulls amidst the storm in a chaotic world, but I was always conscious of the shadow at Temple’s back and had the feeling it couldn’t last very long.

The Reapers are the Angels is a haunting, beautiful and engaging story full of moments of horror, where very few of these come at the hands of zombies. It is also a very powerful story about humanity and one that I can see myself reading again. Like I Am Legend I think it will become a classic of the genre and one against which others will be measured.(less)

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Jun 09, 2011 Isamlq rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Three words:

Gruesome.

Bloody.

Intense. So intense in fact that relief is what I felt with its ending. Well, relief and confusion and anger but yes, most definitely relief.

Temple is fifteen and making her way across a destroyed, zombie-filled America. This destruction is tackled in detail. Everything from where they live, how they live, what they had do to survive is described in detail~ wherein the gruesome nature of the book pops up. This isn’t for everyone, and is definitely not for the faint...more

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Jun 02, 2012 Kelly Leigh rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: post-apocalyptic, zombies

Absolutely fantastic story. And one I'd highly recommend.
If you like The Stand, zombies, even Blood Red Road, strong female characters, self-discovery which goes hand in hand with rich characterization, post-apocalyptic settings, let's see, oh yeah, don't mind a bleak, haunting, terribly depressing yet deeply moving story, then I'd definitely give this gem of a book a try. Bonus, it's beautifully written.

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Jan 13, 2012 Donna The Happy Booker rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Donna by: Maja

Shelves: blood-and-gore, death, its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know, because-someone-else-liked-it, recommended, zombies

I have read so many glowing reviews of The Reapers are the Angels that I simply had to see what all the fuss was about and even though I was warned ahead of time about the bloody bits, I still wanted to read this. I decided to listen to this on audio and I think the narrator did an amazing job giving voice to the conflicted and unique character that was Temple. I would certainly recommend this audio to anyone who is planning to read this.

Temple was an intriguing character, so full of contrasts,...more I have read so many glowing reviews of The Reapers are the Angels that I simply had to see what all the fuss was about and even though I was warned ahead of time about the bloody bits, I still wanted to read this. I decided to listen to this on audio and I think the narrator did an amazing job giving voice to the conflicted and unique character that was Temple. I would certainly recommend this audio to anyone who is planning to read this.

Temple was an intriguing character, so full of contrasts, she was kind and considerate but with the capacity to become extremely violent if provoked which made sense considering the dangerous world she grew up in. She was also extremely intelligent, logical, and self-aware but at the same time illiterate and simplistic in many ways. Her character fascinated me and reminded me, in a lot of ways, of Saba from Blood Red Road except Temple was much more complex. I was fascinated with the way she accepted the world for what it was and did her best to work within it instead of fight against what she could not control. I have to say, Temple is one of the most interesting characters I’ve read.

The writing was vividly descriptive and unapologetically raw. It brought to life a bleak and desolate world overrun by the undead who were themselves more pathetic and sad than scary. The pockets of survivors that Temple came upon showed the best and worst of humanity. It was interesting to see the many ways that desperation and hopelessness may cause people to react. There were some people and situations that pushed the boundaries of believability, even for a zombie book but for the most part, I could realistically imagine that this is what the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse would look like.

For some reason, I felt really disconnected from the story. I’m not sure whether it was the third person narration or the philosophical and highly allegorical way this was written, but while I could pick out a hundred beautifully phrased quotes, I was never truly engaged in the story. At times I felt that the writing was almost a bit pretentious and that it tried so hard to be literature as opposed to genre fiction that it overreached and ended up just being absurd. Or it could simply be that I am more interested in being entertained by a story than in trying to ponder life’s mysteries or decipher allegory.

I definitely enjoyed listening to The Reapers are the Angels and, while it wasn’t really my thing, I can certainly see where other people would appreciate the writing style and depth.
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Nov 12, 2011 rachel rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: from-library, tough-broads, sci-fi-fantasy, of-the-south-or-its-environs, 2011

One of the thoughts that has been cemented pretty firmly in my mind for a while is that despite loving literature of the South, I do not love Cormac McCarthy. I love to hate his snobbery about comma usage and his disdain for flowery writing (which I am sure is code for "women's writing," as it often is with these self-important men). The humorlessness of the author gets superimposed onto his work, extending my annoyance to not only his opinions but his books too.

So as soon as the characters in...more One of the thoughts that has been cemented pretty firmly in my mind for a while is that despite loving literature of the South, I do not love Cormac McCarthy. I love to hate his snobbery about comma usage and his disdain for flowery writing (which I am sure is code for "women's writing," as it often is with these self-important men). The humorlessness of the author gets superimposed onto his work, extending my annoyance to not only his opinions but his books too.

So as soon as the characters in The Reapers are the Angels start talking about fate, and Moses keeps talking about how he "has" to kill Temple even though it's clear he has little heart for the brother she killed in self defense and that he respects her drive, I'm like, "Oh great. Here we go. We're going to be knocking off McCarthy now." And clearly that is my FAVORITE THING EVER.

For the majority of the book, this opinion remained unwavering. I started to full-on hate it when Temple finds mutants in the swamp, because do we really need to add to that stereotype of the South? (See? Told you I get unreasonably annoyed with the McCarthy knockoffs.)

But by the end of the book, something about Temple's love for America the Beautiful had gotten to me, just as it got to Moses. Because that is another opinion that is very close to my heart, the love of our landscape of palm trees and swamps and lighthouses and skyscrapers and deserts. And waterfalls. Temple fantasizes about someday seeing Niagara Falls, and her wanderlust is a reason that she can't ever settle down in a safe house or city and why she heads back out onto the road, zombies and all. This is one aspect of the zombie book that I never thought of: for those of us who'd lose our minds if we had to stay in one place forever, how strong would that urge be post-apocalypse if our lives were at risk?

I am also glad that I read reviews while reading that pointed out the allegorical roles of Moses and Maury. Temple is obligated to save Maury because she failed to save the boy Malcolm who depended on her, that I got. But those of you who understood that Moses is a metaphor for her personal demons, her inability to let the mistakes of her past go -- thank you for helping me to appreciate the book more, to be less annoyed at what seemed the purposelessness of his pursuit.

I try to rate books based on how successful they are at being what they are. This is a successful zombie book and also a successful replication of McCarthy's themes and style (but with fewer made-up words and a more mainstream folksiness), and my personal prejudice is towards liking one of those things but emphatically not the other. And that's why it's three stars. (less)

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