Dead Love

July 12, 2010
In this lethargic zombie tale, McFerrin (Namako: Sea Cucumber) confuses stalking for love and beautiful prose for a meaningful plot. When Erin Orison, a talented young dancer, travels to Japan in search of an audition with a renowned choreographer, she becomes embroiled in a murderous double-crossing conspiracy involving the Yakuza and the mysterious Consortium. Her brief affair with a Yakuza assassin leads to her apparent death and subsequent resurrection as a zombie. Somehow maintaining a measure of free will, she tries to escape the various forces seeking her, stymied at every turn by a supposedly lovesick corpse-hopping ghoul. The detached narration, passive protagonist, and oddly anticlimactic ending are symptoms of an overall failure to turn an interesting idea into a compelling narrative. The hardcover edition includes a 16-page manga not seen by PW.

October 15, 2010

A confusing muddle with a half-turned zombie as heroine and a corpse-possessing ghoul as villain, this novel by an acclaimed writer (Namako: Sea Cucumber; The Hand of Buddha) tries for a romantic air of dissolute decadence but ends up aimless and scattered. It's hard to know whether the reader is supposed to admire or pity Erin, a vain dancer/model whose criminal father lures her to Japan in an effort to steal her mother's fortune There are asides about the history of zombies and ghouls that take pages to finish and read like high school research papers, complete with footnotes. BZG Erin is a true Haitian zombie, alive but enslaved to her master by a cocktail of drugs.

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