Zombies are boring. Oh, they’re horrifying, disgusting, and vile, but once the living grow accustomed to the shuffling, shiftless dead, the tedium sets in. Zombies don’t gloat, seduce, or haunt. They just wait, consciously or not, and the longer they wait, the easier it is to forget about them, and the greater the chance for fatal mistakes. Bob Fingerman’s new novel, Pariah, is the story of a group of zombie-apocalypse survivors, holed up in a tenement building against a city full of monsters. As scared as the men and women are about being devoured alive, they’re also finding it hard to justify living. Slow starvation and constant dread are enough to give anybody a case of the existential blues.
The problem is, while it’s fine for characters to wallow in tedium, asking the audience to join them is a bit much. Fingerman (best known for comics work like Beg The Question) comes up with a solid premise: The apartment complex where his heroes are stuck creates a dilemma of temporary safety, and his attention to detail, making it excruciatingly clear just how uncomfortable such a living arrangement would become, gives the novel a grimy, gripping texture from the first page. Death hovers as an inevitable but unpredictable presence, and Fingerman’s attention to the psychology of the situation, how relationships become both more important to hold onto and that much easier to disrupt, makes for unpleasant but never misanthropic reading.
But what does all this misery add up to? The plot doesn’t really get going until more than a hundred pages into a 365-page book, when an outsider with special influence over the gnawing dead arrives. It’s a great hook, but it’s easy to spend the rest of the novel waiting for it to go anywhere. Fingerman’s eye for absurdity is intermittently effective, but the archetypal heroes and anti-heroes here, while never cliché, aren’t that compelling. Pariah repeatedly references Philip K. Dick’s fiction, and while the novel shares Dick’s appreciation for the grimly surreal, it never kicks into the higher gears it needs to. Instead, it’s content to drag to a conclusion that’s mostly just a relief. The gore, seedy atmosphere, and occasional clever turns keep this from being a complete waste, but in the end, Pariah is less a story than a description of scenery, punctuated by occasional screams.