Valley of the Dead by Kim Paffenroth
Permuted Press, 2010
Rue Morgue has described Paffenroth’s writing as “some seriously smart horror fiction,” but don’t let that make you think this book reads like a textbook. The prose is lyrical and haunting, fitting for a book that drew inspiration from Dante Aligheri’s famous poem, Inferno. But it’s also disturbing and frightening, with enough gore to warrant a warning to the reader: do not to try to eat lunch while reading this book.
Valley of the Dead takes the reader on a journey through a hellish landscape crawling with the undead. Dante himself is the main character in the story, but he is quickly joined by traveling companions, including a fierce and beautiful woman who adds to the tension by being pregnant and about to give birth. The small group stays together, fighting off hungry zombies that show up at every turn, searching for the narrow passage in the mountains that leads to safety.
Each time the undead appear in the story, there is some aspect of human nature that takes center stage in the narrative: lust, anger, fear, despair, greed. Paffenroth invites readers to explore our own, modern human condition in the story’s bloody conflict and resolution. You won’t be graded but you will want to pay attention anyway. There are plenty of surprises and many, many heads are appropriately bashed.
It has been often said that zombies, and zombie fiction, are a great place to learn about American culture and the world’s failure to enlighten or to better mankind. This book reflects that idea, since the walking dead still try to “live” although it’s a bleak, hellish existence, an endless search for food. The living wrestle with a different kind of hunger, but maybe it isn’t so different after all. We all want to survive. We all make the best choices that we know how to make.
When you consider that perhaps the living and the undead can somehow coexist together, it paves the way for some twisted relationships. Paffenroth has a few characters that make use of the undead in very wicked, selfish ways. This was, for me, the most disturbing part of the book. I won’t give it away. You need to have it sneak up on you.
Paffenroth speculates that Dante must have truly seen some of the terrors he described in The Divine Comedy. In that masterpiece, Dante describes a journey through three realms of the afterlife. The most famous of its three volumes is Inferno, which describes hell.
Dante was born in 1265 in Florence, Italy. Scholars say he had some “missing years,” 1302-1319, and his exact whereabouts were not known, not documented. It’s these missing years in Dante’s life that Paffenroth makes admirable use of, balancing the scholarly aspect of Dante’s horrific descriptions in Inferno with the thrill ride of a zombie story.
“I heard on all sides lamentations uttered,
And person none beheld I who might make them,
Whence, utterly bewildered, I stood still.”
Dante, Inferno, 13.22-24
Permuted Press, 2010
Rue Morgue has described Paffenroth’s writing as “some seriously smart horror fiction,” but don’t let that make you think this book reads like a textbook. The prose is lyrical and haunting, fitting for a book that drew inspiration from Dante Aligheri’s famous poem, Inferno. But it’s also disturbing and frightening, with enough gore to warrant a warning to the reader: do not to try to eat lunch while reading this book.
Valley of the Dead takes the reader on a journey through a hellish landscape crawling with the undead. Dante himself is the main character in the story, but he is quickly joined by traveling companions, including a fierce and beautiful woman who adds to the tension by being pregnant and about to give birth. The small group stays together, fighting off hungry zombies that show up at every turn, searching for the narrow passage in the mountains that leads to safety.
Each time the undead appear in the story, there is some aspect of human nature that takes center stage in the narrative: lust, anger, fear, despair, greed. Paffenroth invites readers to explore our own, modern human condition in the story’s bloody conflict and resolution. You won’t be graded but you will want to pay attention anyway. There are plenty of surprises and many, many heads are appropriately bashed.
It has been often said that zombies, and zombie fiction, are a great place to learn about American culture and the world’s failure to enlighten or to better mankind. This book reflects that idea, since the walking dead still try to “live” although it’s a bleak, hellish existence, an endless search for food. The living wrestle with a different kind of hunger, but maybe it isn’t so different after all. We all want to survive. We all make the best choices that we know how to make.
When you consider that perhaps the living and the undead can somehow coexist together, it paves the way for some twisted relationships. Paffenroth has a few characters that make use of the undead in very wicked, selfish ways. This was, for me, the most disturbing part of the book. I won’t give it away. You need to have it sneak up on you.
Paffenroth speculates that Dante must have truly seen some of the terrors he described in The Divine Comedy. In that masterpiece, Dante describes a journey through three realms of the afterlife. The most famous of its three volumes is Inferno, which describes hell.
Dante was born in 1265 in Florence, Italy. Scholars say he had some “missing years,” 1302-1319, and his exact whereabouts were not known, not documented. It’s these missing years in Dante’s life that Paffenroth makes admirable use of, balancing the scholarly aspect of Dante’s horrific descriptions in Inferno with the thrill ride of a zombie story.
“I heard on all sides lamentations uttered,
And person none beheld I who might make them,
Whence, utterly bewildered, I stood still.”
Dante, Inferno, 13.22-24
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