As such, you might wonder what would cause me to spend my money on not one, but two zombie books. Well, the truth is that I had nothing else to read and I knew that Mira Grant is the pseudonym of Seanan Maguire (who writes the October Daye series that I love so much), so I figured I'd pick up Feed in order to support an author I like and give myself something new to review for Collector Times. That's how much I care for you, dear readers. I'll even read zombie books for you.

As I expected, I didn't really like Feed at first. The writing was good, the characters were likeable, but it was all "zombie apocalypse this" and "zombie apocalypse that." My eyes would glaze over at the descriptions of post-zombie-uprising technology. I couldn't care less about zombie virus testing units, or decontamination showers. I understood that they were an important part of the setting, a way of showing how humanity had to adapt to the terrifying scourge of flesh-eating monsters, but I also didn't care.

But then things got interesting. Instead of focusing on fighting zombies, Feed is about politics, society, and most of all journalism in the wake of a zombie plague. In the future posited by Mira Grant, bloggers have taken over journalism, due to the speed and flexibility of being able to report on the web. The story follows a blogging team, the Mason siblings Shaun and Georgia and their trusty fiction writing, tech genius friend Buffy, as they win the chance of a lifetime opportunity to travel with a presidential candidate on the campaign trail.

In the world of the Newsflash Trilogy, bloggers are broken up into three basic groups - Newsies, who report on facts, Irwins who like to poke dead things with sticks and film the results, and Fictionals, who write stories and poetry. The differences between the three styles of blogging are illustrated by the three main characters. Georgia (or George, as she prefers to be called) is the narrator and pursues the truth no matter what obstacles are thrown in her way. Shaun serves as the action hero, fighting zombies to keep things from getting boring and providing snappy lines along the way. Buffy is kind of hippie-dippie (although also Catholic, a weird combination) but proves invaluable due to her ridiculous collection of easily-hidden cameras that help the team record every thing that happens to them.

The presidential campaign is spiced up by zombie attacks and shadowy conspiracies, so that what started out as a story about poking zomies with stucks turns into a tense page-turner. I'm not sure exactly when I went from "I'm reading this because I want Seanan to make money as a writer and keep writing Toby books" to "Hey, this is actually pretty good" but I can tell you that by the end, I wanted to do nothing but finish the book, and that my next trip to the bookstore was to pick up Deadline so I could find out what happened next.

I can't say too much about Deadline without dropping significant spoilers about the end of Feed, and that's just not the kind of girl I am, so I'll keep it brief and vague: the second book of the trilogy lets Shaun take over as narrator while the team continues to investigate the conspiracy revealed in Feed, and it also reveals more about the nature of the Kellis-Amberlee virus that causes the zombification. It was also an enjoyable page-turner, and I'm impatiently waiting for volume 3 (Blackout).

I definitely recommend this trilogy for anyone looking for a smart zombie series, with a good balance of gore-spattered fight scenes and fast-paced plotting, along with complex characters. I guess I can't truthfully say that I don't read zombie books anymore!