Boneshaker

[sawyl]

I've just read Cherie Priest's excellent and enjoyable Boneshaker, which skillfully blends the staples of noir steampunk with those of the zombie slasher. Being a class act, Priest never actually uses the Z word but instead refers to her living dead as rotters. Far more atmospheric; and Boneshaker is nothing if not gloriously atmospheric.

The story is set in 1880s Seattle, a town still grappling with the after effects of a disastrous experiment dreamed up by scientist Leviticus Blue some 16 years before at the height of the gold rush. Commissioned by the Russians to build a mining machine capable of extracting gold from the frozen tundra, Blue created the titular boneshaker. But, during the test run the drill ran amok, causing vast sink holes to form and a toxic gas, the Blight, the billow up from core of the earth and turned a good portion of town's population into the living dead; into rotters. Unable to manage the consequences of the Blight, the remaining citizens of Seattle simply bricked up the effected area, shifted to the Outskirts, and attempted to resume something like a normal life.

For Briar Wilkes, Levi Blue's widow, something like a normal life involves working long hours at the water purification, enduring the scorn of her colleagues and neighbours, and trying not to be too neglectful of her son, Ezekiel. But when Zeke decides venture into Old Seattle to search for evidence that he believes may exonerate his father, an appalled Briar sets off in hot pursuit. Calling in favours owed to her father, a famously evenhanded lawman who distinguished himself during the Blight crisis, she is able to barter a one-way zeppelin trip into the ruins.

Life over the wall is precarious at best. With the air hopelessly contaminated by the zombie-triggering Blight, the few humans in the zone are forced to rely on inefficient gas masks to scurry between rare redoubts where air has been piped in from towers that extend beyond the toxic zone. Here both Briar and Zeke encounter a range of strange characters from native princesses to civil war deserters to mechanical armed pub landladies, and, whenever they chance the streets, fast and deadly rotters whose slightest bite can trigger appalling gangrene.

Boneshaker is a delight from start to finish. The setting is particularly good. The need to wear anti-Blight masks gives the whole thing a claustrophobic feel and gives every chase an extra edge, as the characters struggle to bread enough to allow them to escape the trailing corpses. Even the safe locations don't really feel all secure — at one point, Briar starts to say how impressed she is with the calm of one of the redoubts only to be interrupted by a rotter raid.

The characters too are good, and Briar Wilkes is especially well drawn. At the start of the book, her attitudes towards her son are slightly ambivalent. Although she obviously cares about Zeke, her attitude is tempered by her difficult feelings for his father, the almost complete exhaustion brought on by her job and their general poverty. But as soon as she realises that her son is missing, she knows that she's the only on who can save him. As the plot unfolds Briar is forced to confront both the legacy of her ex-husband and the reverential attitude of other people to her dead father.

I'm not at all surprised that the novel has been nominated for this years Hugos. Plus, the Tor edition has wonderful Jon Foster cover. What's not to love?