Book Review: Alice in Zombieland by Lewis Carroll and Nickolas Cooke
Alice in Zombieland by Lewis Carroll and Nickolas Cooke. © 2011 Sourcebooks. ISBN 9781402256219. Paperback. Humor/Horror/Fantasy. 288 pages. Source: ARC furnished by the publisher.
Review: A mashup of Alice and zombies! Oh, she thought, life can’t get better than this! Especially since the Tenniel illustrations have been so lovingly adapted to zombification.
On the whole, I loved this. There’s not much that lends itself to twistedness better than Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. At first I was worried that it might just be turning everything into zombies and Corpse Turtles and such. But no, there were characters still living (or else, I imagine, it would have been terribly dull, she thought). I did find there were a few continuity errors near the end, at the Knave of Hearts’ trial. I know, I know, you wonder how Alice can have continuity errors. It all had to do with the Red Queen’s metal box. Alice is told earlier what it does; she even sees the Red Queen with it during the croquet game (and what a visual that was!). But she doesn’t seem to know what it does or why the queen has it during the trial. Okay, nobody knows exactly how it works, but they do know what it does.
And one quibble in addition to the continuity. The tarts poem. You know, the one that starts “The Queen of Hearts she baked some tarts.” One of the reasons it works is because of the internal rhyme. The author changed it to meat pies, which doesn’t really work. Meat tarts would have been fine. Especially as during the trial, they were referred to as tarts instead of meat pies. It felt a little like the author got a bit lazy near the end.
On the whole, though, quite fun and worth reading if you like Alice and zombies. If you’re an Alice purist, though, you’ll probably be annoyed. 4/5.
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