★★☆☆☆ There must be a more concise way to say, "Scientists are bad, and I don't understand virology."

Rise: A Newsflesh Collection

Mira Grant

Rise: A Newsflesh Collection is a collection of short fiction adjacent to Seanan McGuire's Newsflesh series of zombie novels. It includes all the Newflesh short fiction currently (14-Jul-2022) listed on Goodreads' Newsflesh series page, except for Fed. And the collection is NOT short. Most of the eight stories included are novellas and took me about two hours each. So, it was a long slog, which I undertook only as part of my project to read everything McGuire has published. I was glad to reach the end. There is, in my opinion, one rather good story in here: The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell. By itself it would rate a high three stars. It is the reason the book gets two stars rather than one.

Without further ado, here are the stories:

Countdown tells the story of how the Kellis-Amberlee virus (the Newsflesh zombie virus) came to be. it is a long recitation of McGuire's deep misconceptions about virus biology.

Everglades recounts the story of some folks who died during the initial outbreak of the zombie virus (AKA The Rising). Even though I just read it, I barely remember this story.

San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats is a story about zombies taking over San Diego Comic-Con in the early days of The Rising. This one had potential -- it featured Mahir Gowda interviewing one of the survivors. But is is far too long.

How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea is a story about Australia's post-Rising society and structure. It is kind of an extended "Ain't Australia Great?" hymn, which might appeal more to Australians than to me. The story strained my suspension-of-disbelief muscles. The Australians I have known are not THIS different from normal humans.

The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell is, as I already indicated, the only actual good story in the collection, in my opinion. It is about a first-grade teacher's struggle to save students in an outbreak in her school. This is the first Mira Grant story I have read to effectively convey terror. The teacher also becomes an important character in the later stories and one of the novels.

Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus is centered on a character we met in the novels, Dr Shannon Abbey, Abbey sometimes identifies as a "mad scientist", but she argues that this term is condescending and ableist, which, OK, yeah, it is that. In her introduction to the story McGuire writes "Dr Shannon Abbey is possibly one of my favorite characters in the entire Newsflesh setting". She is definitely not one of MY favorite characters. Like almost all the scientists in McGuire's writing, Abbey is a horrible person, who often wants horrible things and is ethically flexible enough to fabricate a justification to do anything she wants*.

All the Pretty Little Horses is the origin story for Shaun and Georgia's parents, Stacy and Michael Mason. Stacy and Michael come across as very bad parents in the main series, which is told from Shaun and Georgia's points of view. This story is their side.

Coming to You Live, the final story, is mainly an excuse to reunite the band. It brings all the good guys together in one place (Abbey's lab). Here "good guys" means only "those characters who play on Shaun and Georgia's team". They are not all good guys in the sense of fighting for Truth, Justice, and the Your Favorite Nation-ian way.

*Alarmingly, McGuire tells us in the Acknowledgements that Shannon Abbey is modeled after a real person, Brooke Abbey. If I ever see Brooke Abbey approaching me on the sidewalk, I'm crossing the street.

Amazon review

Goodreads review

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