2018 Book of the Year: "The Death and Life of Schneider Wrack" by Nate Crowley

               I liked a lot of books this year. Most of them have received plenty of press already, and you hardly need me to tell you that “Mario Vargas Llosa’s “The Feast of the Goat” was good, or that I liked “Kafka on the Shore” as much as I liked Murakami’s other novels. However, one book that I greatly enjoyed has kept a lower profile, and so I wanted to make sure to write that I really liked Nate Crowley’s “The Death and Life of Schneider Wrack.”

               I came across this book purely by accident, while browsing Barnes & Noble in the spring. They had a small Horror genre table set up, mainly displaying an array of horror classics. However, my eye was caught by the book’s stark cover, an illustration of a decaying fist clenched in defiance. The description’s punchy premise of a zombie revolution overcame my usual aversion to zombie stories (with a fantasy setting acting as a major incentive). I bought it on a whim and placed it on my horror pile, to wait for Halloween season. I looked forward to it throughout the year, and was vindicated from page one.

               “Schneider Wrack” is a cyberpunk whalecore horror-fantasy novel that takes spiritual inspiration from “Moby Dick.” The publication itself was Frankensteined together from Crowley’s two novellas, and this is clear from the introduction of an entirely new storyline around the midpoint of the book. The first half, “The Sea Hates a Coward,” is set in the world of an ancient, eternally-besieged seafaring city-state. This city, Lipos-Tholos, supplies itself by sending its fishing fleet through a portal to a world called Ocean, to trawl for sea monsters. One would primarily envision a sea monster hunt as a thrilling, thalassophobic chase of a deadly foe, and this is sometimes the case. However, the primary task of the Tavuto, the fleet’s hulking flagship, is the bloody and offal-choked harvest of dumb, unthinking mega-fish. The rendering process requires copious labor, and Lipos-Tholos provides it in the form of criminals, executed and reanimated as zombies. Among the common thieves and POWs sent to the Tavuto is Schneider Wrack, possibly a revolutionary dissident, though he cannot recall through the zombie haze. Wrack wakes to consciousness one day in the rendering plant, and, after an initial horrified confusion, reasons out his location and status. Other malcontents, such as the executed enemy soldier Mouana, slowly accrue to Wrack’s cause, and he finds himself as the leader of a rebellion against the overseers.

               “The Sea Hates a Coward” does an excellent job of capturing a melancholy nautical atmosphere of brine-stained charts and lonely voyages. Crowly writes a refreshing type of fantasy that does not rely on exhaustively-cataloged worldbuilding, but instead expands by necessity: sometimes to move the story along, and sometimes just to add flavor to the world. This is clear when the story expands into its second part, “Grand Amazon,” where a new setting, new antagonist, and new motivations are introduced.

               Wrack’s revolution is successful after he enlists the aid of the primordial alien intelligence that turns out to power the Tavuto, and he takes the fight to Lipos-Tholos, decapitating their leadership and escaping as the besiegers break through the lines. As it develops, these besiegers are commanded by Dust, a legendarily brutal mercenary warlord who revels in battle through drugs that allow her to experience it through synesthesia. Dust is after the secret of the regeneration that brought Wrack and his crew back as zombies. This originates in the world of Grand Amazon, a known world where the jungle always reclaims any attempts at colonization. Wrack and his companions must interpret an ancient, Humboldt-esque travelogue that will allow them to sail up the river to the origin of the technology, ultimately not even to be found on the map. This task, and the (literally) gut-wrenching obstacles they face, are complicated further by Wrack’s status as inhabiting the entombed body of the space intelligence. This sarcophagus must be hauled along on the voyage while Wrack putters around, occupying the body of one of the Tavuto’s reanimated-but-rotting cyborg crabs (trumping “Jonny Mnemonic’s” cybernetic dolphin in the cyberpunk sea life competition).

               This brings us to the book’s humor. I expected the novel to be a horror-comedy, a Pratchett-esque deconstruction of some zombie tropes with tongue planted in cheek. I was consistently impressed by how the humor was seamlessly worked into the world and story, largely taking the form of grotesquerie and excess. Dust is an excessive antagonist, the uprising is excessive in its carnage, the overseers’ collection of zombified and mechanically-augmented sea life is excessive. There is always a new sight around the corner or around the next bend in the river, lasting until the novel’s final page. In my opinion, the novel is better off for Crowley apparently not having had it entirely mapped out from the beginning, and building the world as the story warranted (this being the touch that is reminiscent of Pratchett after all). The book ends on something of an ambiguous note, and although there is no indication that a future installment is planned, I want one.