Dead Love by Linda Watanabe McFerrin
Dead Love, ‘a novel about Japan…and zombies,’ according to its cover, is the latest book by Linda Watanabe McFerrin, author of Namako: Sea Cucumber and short story collection The Hand of Buddha.
Although it’s only been published for a month in America, and isn’t out in the UK until March 2011, there’s already quite a hubbub around it. And with zombies seemingly rising from cemeteries in their thousands to take over our books, comics and cinema screens, it’s publication has been perfectly timed to capitalise on this latest supernatural craze (but don’t despair, even though they’re no longer trendy, our love for teen wizards and slutty vampires will continue unabashed).
Dead Love is the story of Erin Orison, a sulky eighteen-year-old dancer who is just dead-eyed, vapid and unlikeable before her transmogrification into half-zombie as she is afterwards.
After the death of her mother, she is lured to Tokyo by her father, an elusive but sinister overlord involved with all sorts of undesirable crimes, with the promise of an audition with renowned choreographer Hiroshi Nakamura.
She is collected from the airport by Ryu, a sharp-suited tattooed Japanese mobster with a wolf-like grin, “unusual sexual tastes” and an assignment from Erin’s father to have her killed.
Erin is soon revealed to be at the centre of a blackmail plot involving a stolen microchip containing data about her father’s dastardly deals and deeds. But amidst the seedy underworld conspiracy and espionage is a bizarre and diabolical love story; a corpse-inhabiting, shape-shifting ghoul called Clément is smitten by Erin, and determined to enslave her by any means necessary.
The result is a fast-paced chase around the world, involving interrogations of Haitian witchdoctors, voodoo ceremonies, drug-dealers and vampires in Amsterdam and a sanatorium hidden in the Malaysian rainforest.
And there’s no denying that there’s some beautifully-crafted scenes in Dead Love. The author has an almost hyperbolic way with words that is gorgeously evocative and original, especially when it comes to the descriptions of Tokyo, Amsterdam and the zombie sex scenes.
But for me the novel also has several serious flaws. The pace is so fast that Erin’s globe-hopping attempts to escape her pursuer’s clutches read like a mad flit through a grand but hurried hotchpotch of settings, characters and encounters, with no cohesive sense of plot or purpose.
With Erin as the novel’s narrator, the perspective and point of view is confusing in the scenes where she relates Ryu’s activities and encounters in Tokyo, despite our heroine being thousands of miles away, half-zombified and with no way of keeping in contact with him.
An elaborate embroidery weaving fiction together with history, the references to texts such as Tell My Horse by Zora Neale Hurston give the story a factual basis to further intrigue the reader, but as in W. Scott Poole‘s review on Pop Matters, to me the footnotes documenting this source material and other terms were an unnecessary distraction.
Dead Love is published by Stone Bridge Press. It came out last month in America, and will be published in the UK next March. You can already pre-order it from Amazon; the hardback edition will be available for £21.59, and the paperback edition for £11.69.
Jane Bradley
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