Dead Love »

Linda Watanabe McFerrin: Poet, travel writer and novelist Linda Watanabe McFerrin (www.lwmcferrin.com), has been traveling since she was two and writing about it since she was six. A contributor to numerous journals, newspapers, magazines, anthologies and online publications, she is the author of two poetry collections, an award-winning novel (Namako: Sea Cucumber) and short story collection (The Hand of Buddha), and the editor of a travel guidebook (Best Places Northern California) and four literary anthologies. A past winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, she teaches and leads workshops in fiction and creative non-fiction and she is not afraid of the dark.

Zombies, ghouls, vampires, gangsters; pursuit, betrayal, death—it's a globalized manga turned literature. Dead Love is Twilight with teeth.

Publishers Weekly

In this lethargic zombie tale, McFerrin (Namako: Sea Cucumber) confuses stalking for love and beautiful prose for a meaningful plot. When Erin Orison, a talented young dancer, travels to Japan in search of an audition with a renowned choreographer, she becomes embroiled in a murderous double-crossing conspiracy involving the Yakuza and the mysterious Consortium. Her brief affair with a Yakuza assassin leads to her apparent death and subsequent resurrection as a zombie. Somehow maintaining a measure of free will, she tries to escape the various forces seeking her, stymied at every turn by a supposedly lovesick corpse-hopping ghoul. The detached narration, passive protagonist, and oddly anticlimactic ending are symptoms of an overall failure to turn an interesting idea into a compelling narrative. The hardcover edition includes a 16-page manga not seen by PW. (Sept.)