Review of Dread Nation–Civil War Zombies!

When the dead start to rise on the battlefield at Gettysburg, the American Civil War is taken in a whole new direction. This is the premise of Justina Ireland’s unique new zombie tale, Dread Nation. This book has been on my radar since the beginning of the year, so as soon as it came out last month, I hopped on the waiting list to get the audiobook from the library. I love the idea of combining zombie horror with alternative history. Add in a badass teenage heroine who takes on zombies and institutionalized racism alike with her sharp-edged sickles, and I’m 100% sold!

Jane McKeene was born on a Kentucky plantation just days before the dead started rising back up. The sudden appearance of the undead derailed the War Between the States, and though slavery was technically abolished, both sides were too busy fighting off the shamblers to really concentrate on restructuring society. Those in power took advantage of the chaos to pass laws forcing black and Native children to attend combat schools and become the first line of defense against the undead. That’s where we find Jane at the start of the story—at Miss Preston’s School of Combat, a relatively prestigious institution in Baltimore that trains young black girls to become personal Attendants to wealthy white women in the nearby cities. Jane is one of the best fighters in the school, but she has a bit of a problem with following the rules. She also has a problem with Katherine, the pretty, popular girl who always seems to be trying to get Jane in trouble. But when Jane and Katherine find themselves up against a political group called the Survivalists, they realize they may have bigger enemies than each other, or even the shamblers.

As is often the case in zombie stories, the undead are not the true horror. Jane can effortlessly slay a shambler with a swipe of her blade, but deep-seated racism is not so easily destroyed. Rather than bringing people together, the shambler crisis deepens old divides. Black children are used to fight the shamblers because black lives are viewed as disposable in this society, while white folks are protected at all costs behind the city walls. This view is taken to extremes by a new political party calling themselves the Survivalists, who believe that the zombie plague was brought down by God to punish the country for trying to replace society’s “natural order” with racial equality. The Survivalists try to restore order by creating new utopia cities in the West, but Jane quickly realizes that these idealized towns are only bringing back the worst elements of antebellum society.

One of the things I love about this book is the way it unabashedly blends genres. Dread Nation is zombie horror set in the Wild West, complete with cowboys driving the shambler hordes. It has some of the whimsy that I’ve come to associate with steampunk novels like those of Gail Carriger or parodies like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies—there’s just something about that unexpected juxtaposition of 19th-century etiquette and petticoats with hand-to-hand combat! But the book also hits a serious note with some heavy social commentary. Digging more deeply, the two genres I really see embodied here most are the post-apocalyptic and the Southern Gothic. Jane is born into a world where entire cities, states, and ways of living have been destroyed by the shamblers. As often happens in post-apocalyptic fiction, those trying to rebuild, do so with their own ideological agendas in mind. As much as the book is about discovering the corruption rife within society’s new growth, it’s also about exposing the evil that has always been rotting away at its roots—one of the core messages of Southern Gothic. Using romanticized settings like plantations and frontier towns, the story slowly pulls aside a curtain to reveal the ugliness and instability that hides behind these beautiful exteriors. No one is really who they pretend to be, and even Jane has a few dark family secrets herself!

I highly recommend giving Dread Nation a read. You can find a copy at your local retailer, or buy one online and support both indie bookstores and The Gothic Library in the process by clicking this Bookshop.org affiliate link.