Halloween horror reading: Zombies book 8: Justina Ireland's Dread Nation Premise: There’s a zombie outbreak in the midst of the American Civil War. Both sides make peace to unite against the zombie threat. Fifteen-plus years later, the nation is nominally united, with some bastions of civilization left, but the unsettled issues remain, creating a Zombie-based Jim Crow situation. Our lead is a Black teenager, sent by her white mother to be trained in the arts of zombie slaying at a finishing school. Things quickly go wrong, however, and she’s shipped out to a frontier town, where the biggest threat isn’t the surrounding zombies but the people within. Characters: Jane McKeene. Our protagonist. A Black teenager who is deadly with a sickle, and nearly as deadly with her tongue, though her willingness to speak her mind gets her into trouble fairly frequently. Katherine Deveraux. (NOT Kate.) Jane’s frenemy at the academy. She’s not as deadly as Jane, but much better on the social side of the job of “zombie killer/attendant.” White-passing, a little stuck up, and asexual. Jackson Keats. AKA Red Jack. Jane’s ex. They had a not totally defined falling out, but they still assist each other on various issues of smuggling, sneaking, and subterfuge. She still thinks he’s attractive. Gideon. The tinkerer at the town Jane and Kate are sent to. He keeps himself apart from the racist townsfolk, but his inventions keep the town’s electricity running and hold the zombies at bay. Jane finds him attractive as well. Sheriff Snyder. Sheriff of Summerland. His policies towards the undead are based on the tragic loss of his first wife, and his belief that the Black people shipped to the town are expendable. Pastor Snyder. Father to the Sheriff. He believes the zombie plague is a curse from God resulting from the permissive policies that the North adopted towards Black people. Do the dead walk? That is, is it any good? Yes! It might be my favourite premise of everything I’ve read this month. An alternate history set in the aftermath of the Civil War creates a vastly different America, yet one still informed by the pressures and failings of its original history. In fact, I wish we’d seen a lot more of the world at large, instead of the slice we get here. Most of the story is in Summerland, and the whole point is that as a frontier town built on a specifically precarious concept, it’s different from most places. Jane is likeable as a main character; she’s flawed, but that flaw is largely being stubborn and argumentative, traits which would be extremely bad in an actual post-Civil War South, but make her more relatable to a modern-day reader. The plot is engaging, and Ireland does a really good job of setting up a “when will the shoe drop” sense in the reader when it comes to Summerland.