With the proliferation of zombie-porn washing over popular culture, I started book three of BC Book Club, Adam Lewis Schroeder’s All-Day Breakfast, with a generous serving of apocalyptic salt.
Expecting to be left mentally queasy by a gore-filled, escapist comic book fantasy (think The Walking Dead or Brad Pitt tanker World War Z), Schroeder’s tale of an underemployed substitute teacher on a field trip gone wrong instead left me bemused and with a wicked craving for bacon.
Yes, bacon. In Schroeder’s world, zombies are too civilized for brains, and crave the carcinogenic crisp of heavily-cooked pork products. Or rather, the nitrites therein.
And, thankfully for this reader, as the newly minted zombies lose their limbs, tempers and inhibitions, they never lose their penchant for sarcasm and wit.
Unassuming suburbanite Peter Giller has just lost his wife Lydia to cancer, and has decided that the best thing he can do for their two young children, Ray and Josie, is to protect them from a similar fate. He makes meat (or rather the cancer-causing aspects of it), the bad guy in his house, thus giving the small family something not only to blame, but to unite over in their grief.
Disrupting his vegetarian dictatorship is his hummingbird of a mother-in-law, Deb, who stops by the house regularly to help make lunches and patiently ensure there is still some semblance of balance in their household.
Beneath his facade of authority, Peter is, in fact, awash in insecurities. He has an unrequited rivalry with another substitute teacher who poaches his much-needed openings, matched by an apparent need to be understood by his students.
While leading his Grade 11 chemistry class on the annual field trip to a plastics factory in small-town Nebraska, Peter and the largely two-dimensional bunch are doused with a mysterious pink liquid, making them ill and instantly more interesting.
Within a day, Peter is driving his daughter to tears as he shoves fistfuls of bacon in his mouth to satiate the taboo and unexplained cravings.
Two female students from the field trip show up on his doorstep before school; one of them is hiding, in her sweater, an arm that just spontaneously fell off that morning.
Soon, with Bacon Dogs advertised as the daily special, the students are staging a hostile takeover of the school’s cafeteria to keep them in meat, while engaging in hilarious, glaringly normal teen talk about hooking up.
The story takes a dark turn, though, when an agent for the plastics company shows up looking to arrange “compensation” but instead starts burning victim’s houses down, and a tipster with important information is mowed down in the street.
Cue undercover FBI ops, top secret military experiments, and a kooky road trip that banks heavily on the currency of car chases, shovel attacks, and our collective love of all-day breakfast (interspersed with philosophical musings on the finer points of zombiehood: Can a zombie know it's a zombie? Can a zombie drive a car?) in a quest for a cure.
In terms of readfeel, I found the party platter of characters introduced at the beginning to a bit hard to digest. There are so many students, and seemingly endless comebacks and jokes that the reader has had little time to be “in on”, or care about – the action moves so swiftly I found myself more happily turning blood-spattered pages in search of Peter’s salient one-liners.
Holding this romp firmly on the rails, however, are the bittersweet final days of Peter’s wife – kept alive in memories and flashbacks that reveal that this transformation within Peter, right down to his lack of acceptance of his new condition, could also be a metaphor for the stages of grief. As body parts start falling off (and getting stapled back on) in front of the unblinking and unafflicted, the suspension of disbelief wears a bit thin, but the very real account of a young mother dying of swift-moving colon cancer gives Peter, chief zombie and consistently loving father, an affecting backstory.
“Funny how the brain works,” he muses. “We each fall apart in our own time and in our own way.”
This is the fourth book for Schroeder, a Penticton-based author whose previous work, In the Fabled East (Douglas & McIntyre), was a finalist for the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, Canada/Caribbean region and chosen as one of Amazon.ca’s best books of the year.
All-Day Breakfast is quite the departure in subject matter for Schroeder, but he handily demonstrates in this outing that the path of human frailty is lined – or at least lubricated – with bacon. W
• All-Day Breakfast ($22.95) is out now on Douglas & McIntyre. Schroeder is reading at the Vancouver Writers Fest’s Incite series at the Vancouver Public Library May 6.
Book Club questions
• If you suddenly found yourself cursed with a case of the zombies, which city would you want to roam in and why?
• What year do you think this is set in, given the references to American forces at war in Congo and the military’s quest for a way to synthetically “improve” soldiers?
• April is Read Local BC month and I'd love to hear from you. Suggest a book by a BC writer you think I should read next in the comments, or Tweet me! #BCBookClub
Start the conversation on Twitter @kelseyklassen, or by email at [email protected].
