Dust [Paperback]

Joan Frances Turner (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 4, 2011

Nine years ago, Jessie was in a car crash and died. After she was buried, she awoke and tore through the earth to arise, reborn, as a zombie. And there were others-gangs of undead roaming the Indiana woods, fighting, hunting, hidden. But when a mysterious illness threatens the existence of both zombies and humans, Jessie must decide whether to stay and fight or flee to survive...

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Joan Frances Turner on Dust

It started with George Romero, but then it almost always does. Friday night, October sometime in the mid-1990s, and the original 1968 Night of the Living Dead was the only thing on television. I'd never seen it and had no particular interest in zombies, but the only alternative was my contracts law textbook so why not? And from the moment poor doomed Johnny solemnly intoned "They're coming to get you, Bar-buh-rah!", the movie had me, and it kept me, and the ending was a punch in the gut. The grainy black and white, the clumsy acting, the slapdash storyline and foolish self-destructive characters and almost nonexistent special effects weren't deterrents, they were the whole point. It all looked like ancient footage from some amateur documentary, and real people act foolish at the worst possible times. I never saw the remake, or any of the sequels: It wasn't the idea of zombies, themselves, that had me, it was that particular story. I didn't seek out any other.

Flash forward to 2003, and Carnival of Souls. More cheap black and white, shot on a shoestring in the middle of nowhere, and when Mary Henry's hand emerged from the depths of a Kansas lake long after she should have drowned they had me, again. Were those technically zombies, though, or were they ghosts? It had to be the former, for no ghost appears in the flesh as she did, walks among the living almost but not quite one of them, inspires their unwitting yet visceral disgust: They could, so to speak, smell the decay all inside her. That fascinated me, as did the titular carnival at the Saltair Pavilion. Zombies like to dance, it turns out, to eerie, calliope-style music that seems to come from nowhere. Interesting.

What George Romero started Herk Harvey finished, and I couldn't get zombies, themselves, out of my mind. They were ubiquitous, actually, when you started paying attention, but the more I learned about zombies and the popular imagination the duller and less satisfying it all was. Zombies, it turned out, were nothing but a joke. Talk funny. Walk funny. Ugly. Smelly. Filthy. Can't speak English right. Eat disgusting food. Spread disease. Mentally inferior. Lights on, nobody's home. They'll steal and devour everything you hold dear, including yourself. Shoot them. Kill them. Cleanse the earth of their kind. It's a moral imperative.

I was urged at every step, in this particular mythology, to ally myself with The Good Guy, the clean upright English-speaking human alpha male and his ragtag gun-toting buddies who were making the world safe for the One True Species, one bullet-riddled skull at a time. The hell with that. Zombies--actually, Jessie's absolutely right, let's dispense with that misappropriated West African word--the undead are nothing but people who died. Your mother, "Good" Guy, your spouse, your sibling, your child, your friend, your neighbor, you yourself, and what if you only think they're all monsters? What if dead people still have minds of their own, can laugh and fight and form friendships and love each other and grieve--and kill, as you do, for malice and sport as much as from hunger? What if the moans and groans you hear are an actual language? What if the undead have a "life" span, slowly aging and decaying and crumbling into dust just as inert bodies do in the coffin? What if the creature in your crosshairs still remembers you, loves you, can't plead for what you once were to each other before you pull the trigger?

(For that matter, what if your incredibly tedious guns don't even do the job? That's the first determination I made when I sat down to write Dust, that there would be no Deus Ex Firearms whatsoever. Fire itself, that'd work to kill them, but then fire has the disadvantage of spreading like, well, wildfire. As does bio-weaponry, but then we're getting ahead of ourselves.) If Dust could be summed up in one sentence, it would be a lyric from Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: "The history of the world, my sweet, is who gets eaten and who gets to eat." It presupposes a world where the living dead are not some new aberration but have existed alongside the humans they once were for thousands of years, an uneasy harmony occasionally broken up by unfortunate incidents such as, say, the famous Pittsburgh Massacre of '68. Other elements came into play: the Greek myth of Erysichthon, which haunted me since I first read it as a child, about a man the gods punish for his hubris with a hunger so insatiable he ultimately devours...himself. Luc Sante's beautiful, unsentimental prose poem "The Unknown Soldier," in which the forgotten dead assert their right to speak for themselves. The eerie photographs and morbid newspaper clippings from Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip. The unsettling banjo music in the end credits of the cult horror film The Last Broadcast, which inspired the notion that the undead express their strongest emotions through telepathic music: "brain radios." That and eerie waltzes in Carnival of Souls inspired the spontaneous psychic dances, the only moments of true peace and harmony the undead ever enjoy.

Eating, in this world, is identity: The living eat dead meat. The dead eat meat so recently living that it's still warm and pulsing with life. The dead find the living's dietary habits as abominable, disgusting, taboo as the reverse. Every human alive, in our world as well as theirs, pins a far greater part of their self-image than they realize on what goes into their mouths. It was a joke then that Jessie, the fervent vegan in life, began a ravenous flesh-hunter in death, and yet it was also entirely to be expected.

Armed with the facts--such as they were--in September 2003 I jotted down a sparse page of disjointed notes: character names, story locales (the Calumet Region of northwest Indiana, besides being my easily accessible home geography, was both underserved in fiction and had enough urban-suburban-rural-industrial variety to make it interesting), a little folkloric rhyme the undead liked to sing amongst themselves but never made it into the book. The slang--"hoo" for humans, "rotter" and "feeder" and "bloater" and " 'maldie" for each other--also came early because it was fun to think up. Jessie simply walked in right at the start and announced herself, an angry, lonely girl abused in life, abandoned in death, yearning for love and acceptance but furious at the world. It was inevitable she'd take instantly to the jarring, aggressive, insatiably hungry culture of the undead, also inevitable that she'd write off her human family entirely only to have them return to be her undoing. Joe started as a parody, one of those "teen angel" hoods-with-a-heart-of-gold from the fifties pop songs who dies in a drag race gone wrong, and then he surprised me by showing himself as lonely and yearning as Jessie, if not more so, under the brutal surface. It was inevitable, again, that they'd both fall in love. Florian, a literal walking skeleton, was always meant to be the paterfamilias of Jessie's surrogate family, but I never expected him to turn out gentle, genuinely wise, the only true parent she ever really had.

Actually they all surprised me, as I worked little by little on draft one, draft two, draft three through 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007. Renee, the lamb thrown into a pit of snarling wolves, grew up amazingly fast and became not just Jessie's friend, but her ally. Linc--only kindhearted from Jessie's perspective, no human would want to run into him--was supposed to be merely Joe's foil, the "geek" to his "jock," but then quietly, stubbornly, relentlessly worked his way up from the margins of the story to the center. Teresa, the gang leader, was even more selfish and cruel that I'd imagined. (The rival gang the Rat Patrol were exactly as selfish and cruel as I'd imagined, so at least I had some control over the proceedings.) Lisa, Jessie's neurotic mess of a human sister, proved she could be there for Jessie in death as she never was in life. Jim, her brother, began as the most cardboard sort of villain, missing only a mustache to twirl, then I remembered that the truest antagonists are those who genuinely believe they're acting out of kindness and love. Only when Jim tried to "save" Jessie, did it become clear how much he--like all Good Guys--utterly feared and despised what she'd become. Death him/her/itself, the trickster, the demon, the angel, the destroyer, the salvager, was there from the beginning, though he didn't announce himself right away to me any more than to Jessie: Like any trusting parent, he first and foremost wanted to let his undead children try and fend for themselves.

Since the first inspiration for Dust was a pair of B-movies, other midnight drive-in fixtures seemed entirely appropriate: The meteor that causes extraterrestrial chaos upon landing. The semi-secret laboratory with "noble" purpose gone horribly wrong. The pandemic plague--but why just consider what would happen if the living became undead, why not consider what might happen if the undead were brought back to life? Untouchable life, even? What if Death the trickster, in his eagerness to consume the earth, thus ultimately ended up tricking himself?

It's all well and good to talk about Herk Harvey and banjos and falling meteors, but what truly inspired Dust was of course my own fear of death. There's another song, by the musician Exuma, that embodies it: "You won't go to heaven, you won't go to hell/You'll remain in your graves with the stench and the smell." What if the "afterlife" took place right on earth, and you rotted slowly, inexorably, feeling the first bugs nest and hatch on your body? What if you actually had to watch your loved ones grieving you, as Jessie and Renee both did, and be yards away and yet an eternity removed, unable now to be anything to them but a monster? What if pain, fear, longing, grief, the hungers of the body don't stop when life stops? What if Death isn't an angel of mercy, but a real live son of a bitch?

As it turns out, then, for me as for everyone else the undead were an embodiment of fear. But they surprised me, yet again, by becoming embodiments of hope as well. Life doesn't end after death, not really. To become something new, alien, unimagined, is not to lose oneself, one's identity and thoughts and needs and wants, they just express themselves a little differently. Nobody's lost to anyone forever; if there is no afterlife, there is at least the "eternity" of memory. To lose one family is to gain another. Betrayal by loved ones can lead to new, stronger bonds that are about real trust. Nearly everyone's stronger and more capable than they imagine, when put to the test. Flesh is just flesh and if it rots, well, that's only natural.

But that's all very Hallmark Hall of Fame and ultimately it was also about having some fun whistling in the graveyard. Dust was a chance to play with all sorts of notions of life and death: ordinary mortal existence, living consciousness trapped in dead decaying bodies, seemingly "live" flesh rotting and dying from the inside out, invulnerable immortality through the back door. As Jessie says, "How many kinds of living and dead and living dead and dead living had I been in just these few months, these few days, after the stasis of plain old human living and dying? I deserved some kind of existential medal." Tell me about it, it was hard to keep up. It also felt like finding the pulse of something real, and true, about life and death under all the campiness of traditional zombie mythology. Both the B-movie folklore and the insomniac anxieties inspired the book in equal measure, and both deserve their due. It starts with a silly story, some actors shuffling around sideways in worn-out clothes, and ends with real people, real fears, real hopes. But then, it almost always does.

--Joan Frances Turner

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Turner offers an original variation on the near-ubiquitous zombie theme in her debut novel, but her concept doesn't really coalesce by book's end. Rather than being mindless, drooling, shambling monsters, the undead can communicate with each other, struggle for leadership, and form emotional attachments when they're not chowing down on raw meat. Jessica Anne Porter, undead these nine years, is vehemently opposed to the word "zombie," which she considers racist. She belongs to a zombie gang called the Fly-by-Nights that battles other gangs over Wisconsin territory. The inevitable gore ("the nauseating, liquid softness of her brains scrambled eggs under my pounding fist"), and the main activities of daily unliving ("nothing to do but eat raw flesh and sleep too much and fight about nothing") don't offer much for readers to connect with.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Ace Trade; Reprint edition (October 4, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0441020690
• ISBN-13: 978-0441020690
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (48 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #659,491 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joan Frances Turner was born in Rhode Island and grew up in the Calumet Region of northwest Indiana. Dust, her first novel, will be published by Ace Books on September 7, 2010. She is currently at work on a sequel, tentatively titled Frail.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars 3.5 Stars - An intriguing zombie premise that does an excellent job with the gore October 8, 2010

By Mrs. Baumann VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Plot Summary: Killed in a car accident as a young teen, Jessie woke up in her coffin under six feet of earth and clawed her way out to live as a zombie. She met up with a gang of semi-reclusive zombies who haunt the woods of Calumet County, Indiana, and she's been with them ever since. Jessie eschews eating humans - who live in barricaded townships against the zombie menace - and she lives off deer, possum, duck, and any other animal she can hunt. Despite her supernatural strength, Jessie's body will slowly decompose, bloat, become infested with bugs, and then dry up. Despite this grim future, Jessie's survival instinct is strong, and she has a lot of affection for some of the zombies in her gang. When strange-smelling creatures, halfway between dead and alive, begin to infiltrate the forest, Jessie suspects that some of her fellow zombies have caught a new disease, and she tries to piece it all together. What she can't imagine is that she's intimately involved with this new threat to zombies and humans alike, and it will change society forever.

After I read the first chapter I realized that I wouldn't be eating any food while reading Dust. My roast beef sandwich just wasn't palatable after reading about these maggot-ridden zombies who shamble around spitting out black "coffin liquor" while losing body parts in the woods. I give author Joan Frances Turner an A for her vivid, stomach-churning descriptions, because when I'm reading a book about zombies, I want to be grossed out. It's par for the course.

Dust has an interesting premise. The zombies in Ms. Turner's vision retain enough of their humanity to socialize, communicate, and enjoy their undead life, but their hunger instincts eliminate any compassion they might feel for the humans and animals they eat. Zombies can live for centuries, and they communicate via a sort of telepathy, since lips, throats and tongues start to decay soon after death. I can't say I've encountered this kind of zombie before, and I was able to suspend my disbelief for the most part and revel in their disgusting nature. They didn't win my heart, which is kind of a shame since they are "humanized" zombies, but I was rooting for them by the end. The humans themselves didn't elicit any of my sympathy, strangely enough.

The plot unfolds with a series of small, seemingly unconnected events, and by the end there's a full-on plague that practically wipes out life on Earth. I thought it was over several times, but there were more and more pages to read, so I was impressed at how it kept twisting and turning toward its conclusion. Unfortunately the pacing is a little hampered by dreams, flashbacks, and existential passages that made for slow reading at times, but it did build up into something that was exciting to read.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars "Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble." Ben Franklin April 22, 2011

By michael a. draper TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

"My right arm fell off today.Lucky for me, I'm left handed." So begins the story of Jessie Anne Porter. She was killed when she was a teenager and her father crashed into a pickup truck.

Jessie remembers having to crawl to the surface of her grave. Somehow she had become a zombie. She wasn't bothered by her stink but was consumed with hunger and drawn to the scent of a rabbit in the cemetery.

Jessie joins a group of zombies, the Fly-by-Nights. Unlike traditional zombies, the mutated beings had human traits. Florian was ancient and philosophical, Teresa is the pack leader and is territorial and demonstrates jealousy of Jessie.

When Jessie meets Joe, she describes him "The...right side of his face was smashed in..crushed cheekbone...maggots seethed from every pore."

It demands certain discipline for the uniniated to read a zombie story. I was constantly grossed out as, at one point a large beetle emerged from one zombie who made the transition from a bloater to a breeder.

A new illness is discovered which causes the undead beings to grow new skin and muscles and become more lifelike. At the same time, humans or hoos become near death and often wish to be killed.

The story continues with groups attempting to gain power but this illness seems like an epidemic and the reader must learn the effect on both groups.

Jessie and Florian are unique characters and the novel gets a good mark for originality and the telling of a tale. I did think that the novel was too long in developing the main part of the story and could have been condensed.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars dark, intense, depressing and excellent August 5, 2010

By I Teach Typing

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

I ordered a pre-release of Dust hoping for some fun to hold me over until The Living Dead: The Beginning is released. Instead of the typical ultraviolent zombie bloodbath that I was expecting, Dust delivered an intense, disturbingly realistic post-apocalyptic world, told by a sympathetic hero, who happens to be dead. If you are tempted to dismiss this book off-the-top as a copycat "through the eyes of the undead" rip off of Anne Rice's famous stories or Breathers: A Zombie's Lament don't worry this book is a VERY different beast. The world is totally bleak and scary and the characters are trying stay "alive" (... errr undead... errr sentient) instead of puttering around in the world of the living. Probably the closest book I have read to this is I Am Legend (not the movie). Both books paint a similar depressing horror world but this one offers 24 hour high-speed full-color zombie hell instead of the slower pace, safe in the daylight world of I am Legend.

While this is not a really gory book by modern zombie standards (dismemberment is rare) it is not for the faint of heart. The heroine is falling apart (literally) and she deals with the undead who are putrefying and are chronically infested with bugs. Some sections will leave you applauding for the excellent grossness and going to get a can of Raid.

While I love this book it is not without flaws. The descriptions of the zombies communicating telepathically with musical overtones and the group dancing is really distracting and pulled me away from the flow of the text in a couple places.

Even with the weaknesses this book is exceptionally hard to put down and a truly excellent nightmarish adventure.