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Mira Grant
5 of 5 Stars
I read this when it was new, and I had a child in preschool. It was very good. And I never, ever want to read it again.
Not that I have a reason to. It's already seared into my memory.
There's a zombie outbreak in an elementary school, a cascading failure of one preventative measure after another, and it follows how one teacher manages to get some of her students out alive. At a terrible cost.
It's an extended metaphor for school shootings, but years later, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, schools reopened with children entering the campus one at a time after a health screening (temperature checks, not blood tests), sanitizing everything...and then I saw a picture of a classroom with individual transparent barriers around each desk. And it's worked about as well, though at least Covid doesn't turn its victims into mindless killing machines. That's what cable news and social media are for.
— Kelson Vibber, 2022-06-05. Updated 2023-12-06.