The Death and Life of Schneider Wrack

It took me a while to get through ‘The Death and Life of Schneider Wrack’ as it had an about evenly balanced mixture of interesting and frustrating elements. When I began reading, the setting of a monstrous whaling ship crewed by undead slaves seemed like a Snowpiercer-level allegory for capitalism. However the opening chapters started as they meant to go on: with intriguing world-building nearly submerged beneath an excessive quantity of gore. All the main characters are zombies, which makes some gruesomeness inevitable. However, the continual body horror proved a distraction from a genuinely interesting sci-fi adventure. I enjoyed the pastiche 19th century settings: a whaling ship, besieged city, and river winding through show more unexplored jungle; I was much less keen on the gory and repetitive fight scenes. The book was apparently written as two novellas originally, which explains the odd recap halfway through. In the second part, the narrative point of view extends beyond the titular Wrack to Mouana, who I much preferred. Although everyone is depressingly OK with murder and torture, at least Mouana has a decently developed backstory and nemesis. Latterly, she is honest with Wrack (who can conveniently read her mind somehow), which is pleasing, and makes some good decisions. Her txt-speak when messaging him is maddening, though. The ship names are excellent; Asinine Bastard is a particular highlight. It felt to me like there was so much potential in the plot and world-building of this novel, yet it kept swerving into B-movie splatterpunk rather than developing them. Then the ending resolved absolutely nothing, which was very annoying. show less