What to do until the zombies come

Monster Island by David Wellington
(print version) Running Press, Philadelphia $13.95
Full text available on-line at brokentype.com

A small band of Somali child-solders, with a former UN weapons inspector, survivors of the zombiefication of the Earth, come to New York in search of vital medical suplies. The only things in their way are about forty million New Yorkers. Dead ones.

I don’t normally read horror novels. Mostly because they’re normally horrible.

So believe me when I tell you that I didn’t initially pick up Monster Island for the subject matter; rather, in spite of it. Not that I think there’s anything all that wrong with the genre; H. P. Lovecraft was a masterful author, as were Bram Stoker (Dracula) and Mary Shelly (Frankenstein). And, of course, Richard Matheson wrote a classic novel very like Monster Island in theme, namely I Am Legend.

But as for more "modern" horror authors, well, I’ve read a few, all highly regarded authors with well reviewed books, and even if I admired the writing I’ve never warmed to what was written. So now you know where I’m coming from.

What attracted me initially to Monster Island was the way it had been published. It originally appeared free on-line as a series of blog posts, a few new posts every week, back in 2004. The book gained quite a following that way and was finally brought out in print (that’s actual hard-copy print) in 2006 (the free "ebook" is still available on-line). Since then there have been two sequels, Monster Nation and Monster Planet, making a well-reviewed trilogy.

I liked the idea of publishing a novel on-line that way, but privately I doubted that it would be any good. I’ve read a couple of similar "on-line publishing" attempts in the past, and found them lacking. Bloody awful, actually. But since this one had gone from on-line book to print, and was still available on-line, I thought this one might be different.

Not different enough to bother looking up, though; because I didn’t find the idea of a "zombie novel" all that appealing, I never even bothered to look for the web site. I had just heard about the book from someone, and filed that information away in what’s left of my mind and went on with reading books with ships on the covers.

Then I’m in a bookstore a week or so ago, looking for (of all things) a book to read and finding nothing that struck my fancy, when I noticed a copy of Monster Island just asking to be bought and read. So I bought it and read it.

And I have to admit that I really liked it.

But I’m no fan of horror novels, and aside from Matheson’s I Am Legend a total stranger to books about shambling hordes of the undead wondering the streets, so perhaps I’m not qualified to review the novel. So I won’t. Suffice to say that the book deals with a small band of survivors in zombie-infested New York, and leave it at that; not all that imaginative, perhaps, but pretty damned well written and it certainly kept me reading. No mean feat, that.

As much as I liked the novel, from the start I was more taken with the way it had been published. Frankly, in a type of publishing venture that has so often failed this one succeeded and succeeded brilliantly. That alone would have made the book worth looking at; the fact that it turned out to be a damn good read was a bonus.

I found it extremely interesting that what had been published was, in effect, the first draft. As a first draft, this is an amazing achievement. I imagine it must have been quite the experience to read the novel as he wrote and posted individual chapters on-line, and I wonder how much of a plan the guy wrote to. In other words, I can’t help but wonder how much of the novel followed any sort of outline and how much was allowed to, as it were, grow organically. In my own writing, I’ve tried both approaches, with varying degrees of success; I have never found a workable balance between the two approaches and I wonder if Wellington has.

And I like the idea of keeping the on-line version available free even as the printed novel is selling in bookstores, in effect competing with itself. I get the impression that for David Wellington, getting his work before the public is more important than selling it. I admire such an attitude.

It’s risky to publish this way, without an editor or a publisher or a group of "beta" readers. You’d be publishing blind, working, as it were, without a net. All of these people, in traditional publishing environments, provide layers of protection for the author, and each successive step in the process provides one more chance to fix anything that needs fixing. That’s why traditional publishing works the way it does...because that way does work. It may be cumbersome, and a bit frustrating, but it works.

Wellington has taken a non-traditional approach and made it work for him, and work very well indeed. I can admire him for that. Sadly, his is the exception rather than the rule. But I can’t help but notice that if you added up all of my blog posts, I’d be a fair way along to a novel myself, if I had chosen to go that route.

As I said, I really liked this book. Will I read the others in the trilogy? Probably...eventually. Well written though they may be, they’re still not my kind of novels, so I won’t be rushing right out to pick up the unread volumes. Even though I’m glad I read the first novel, right now I feel like rereading Redwall or Watership Down...something with cute furry talking animals. Live ones.

The Blues Viking


Further Reading

Read what Wikipedia has to say about this novel

The on-line version of the book

Order the printed novel from Amazon.com

David Wellington’s web site

The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.