Dust » (Unabridged)

Joan Frances Turner was born in Rhode Island and grew up in the Calumet Region of northwest Indiana. A graduate of Brown University and Harvard Law School, she lives near the Indiana Dunes with her family and a garden full of spring onions and tiger lilies, weather permitting. Dust is her first novel.

Nine years ago, Jessie was in a car crash and died. After she was buried she awoke and tore through the earth to arise, reborn, as a zombie. Now she and her zombie gang, the Fly-by-Nights, roam the Indiana woods. When a mysterious illness threatens the existence of both zombies and humans, Jessie must choose between looking away or staring down the madness-and hanging on to everything she now knows as life...

Publishers Weekly

Turner offers an original variation on the near-ubiquitous zombie theme in her debut novel, but her concept doesn't really coalesce by book's end. Rather than being mindless, drooling, shambling monsters, the undead can communicate with each other, struggle for leadership, and form emotional attachments when they're not chowing down on raw meat. Jessica Anne Porter, undead these nine years, is vehemently opposed to the word "zombie," which she considers racist. She belongs to a zombie gang called the Fly-by-Nights that battles other gangs over Wisconsin territory. The inevitable gore ("the nauseating, liquid softness of her brains scrambled eggs under my pounding fist"), and the main activities of daily unliving ("nothing to do but eat raw flesh and sleep too much and fight about nothing") don't offer much for readers to connect with. (Sept.)