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Tankbread (Tankbread, #1)

Paul Mannering

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Jan 19, 2018 Stephen Kozeniewski rated it really liked it

Let me start off by saying that TANKBREAD has an incredibly compelling premise: intelligent zombies known as "evols" have taken over the world. They only deign to allow humanity to exist as long as our scientists provide them with delicious, stem cell-heavy clones known as tankbread.

My primary complaint about the book is that this premise is completely and almost instantly squandered. After a single scene with a smart, malevolent evol, the whole concept is dispensed with, as it is revealed ther Let me start off by saying that TANKBREAD has an incredibly compelling premise: intelligent zombies known as "evols" have taken over the world. They only deign to allow humanity to exist as long as our scientists provide them with delicious, stem cell-heavy clones known as tankbread.

My primary complaint about the book is that this premise is completely and almost instantly squandered. After a single scene with a smart, malevolent evol, the whole concept is dispensed with, as it is revealed there are also dumb, feral zombies, and for the rest of the book they become the primary antagonists. It was about as disappointing as watching "Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis" and finding out that the truly entertaining Trioxin 2-4-5 zombies had been replaced with some weaksauce Romero-light garbage.

So, setting that disappointment aside, I decided to evaluate this as a standard zombie potboiler. Viewed through that lens, it gets some high marks for originality. For one, it's set in Australia, which is nice change of pace from the usual urban North American climes where zombies in horror fiction seem exclusively to congregate. The story is largely a HOBBIT-style "there and back again narrative" as the unnamed protagonist and his young ward, an awakened tankbread clone, head from Sydney to Woomera on the first half of their quest, and then turn back.

The characters encounter a convent, a fishing village which play-acts old movies, some towns connected by a train line, and a few other communities in a series of vignettes, then revisit them on the return journey and witness how their various survival plans held up. (A particular highlight was the medieval-styled village of an Australian SCA-analogue, though that only appeared on the return journey.) The narrative structure allowed Else, the awakened tankbread clone, to view each mini-society first through the eyes of a child, then, after a preternaturally fast maturation due to the density of stem cells in her brain, to see them again after her intellectual and (mild) emotional awakening.

Else's abbreviated adolescence is an enjoyable character arc, as she quickly goes from not knowing how to use cutlery to debating Kierkegaard. Unfortunately, few of the other characters get as much room for personal growth, and the unnamed main character remains an Eastwood-style strong-and-silent type throughout, perhaps by design. I would've enjoyed seeing Soo-Yong, the only real evol antagonist, given a chance to chew more scenery in particular.

Three quarters of the way through the book I had more or less settled on giving this a three-star rating with a general opinion of "an above-average zombie procedural which squandered a unique premise" but after the conclusion, I had to bump it up a full star. The unusual and grotesque body horror of the finale redeemed much of the story. If Mannering had either followed through on the intelligent zombie overlords premise or, instead, focused earlier on the borderline Bizarro-style monstrosity of the "Adam" zombie, TANKBREAD would likely have been an all-time classic. As it stands, I consider it an above-average zombie story which leaves me hopeful about the sequels. ...more

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Feb 19, 2014 Philip marked it as to-read · review of another edition

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