Newsflesh

About the Newsflesh series

Twenty-some years after two well-meaning cures -- one for cancer, one for the common cold -- combined to accidentally create a virus that reanimates the dead, humanity has adapted. Blogging, not broadcast news, is the trusted press, since bloggers proved they'd report the truth about the outbreak when traditional media wouldn't. Feed opens Newsflesh with bloggers Georgia and Shaun Mason, adoptive siblings running a news team, landing the assignment of a lifetime covering a presidential campaign in a world where every rustle in the bushes could be the infected dead -- and discovering the official story about the zombie apocalypse is nowhere near the whole truth.

Mira Grant (a pen name of Seanan McGuire) builds a rigorously scientific zombie mythology here -- the Kellis-Amberlee virus, blood-testing checkpoints, amplification thresholds -- and uses it to write political and media thrillers as much as horror: Feed is described by the author as a political thriller with zombies, Deadline a medical thriller with zombies, and Blackout a conspiracy thriller with zombies. Feedback runs parallel to the original trilogy, following a second campaign-trail news team whose outbreak experience diverges sharply from the Masons'.

Sharp, political, and willing to make devastating choices with its cast, Newsflesh is one of the more acclaimed literary takes on the zombie genre, earning multiple Hugo Award nominations.

How to read this series

Read the core trilogy in publication order: Feed, Deadline, Blackout. It's one continuous, tightly plotted story about the Mason siblings and the truth behind the outbreak, with major consequences and revelations that build book to book -- do not skip ahead. Feedback is a parallel novel set in the same outbreak-era world, following a different news team whose story runs alongside (not after) the original trilogy's events; it can be read anytime after finishing the trilogy, since it fills in a different part of the same timeline rather than continuing from Blackout. Rise: The Complete Newsflesh Collection gathers the series' shorter fiction and novellas in one volume for readers who want the full picture.