The Cold Beneath Book Review

Zombies are kind interesting, and most of America seems to agree. In the last decade and a half people have been zombie crazy. And much like zombies, everyone bitten by zombie media turns into someone producing zombie material. Shows, games, dlc, movies, books, comics, toys and every other single thing you can imagine has been zombified. Kinda ironic. After awhile I tuned out because it became white noise. Until I happened upon this little gem. If you ever wanted a steampunk story with zombies that doesn't feel like a rip off of The Walking Dead, this is for you.

The Cold Beneath is a full novel by Tonia Brown, who I mentioned once before here as the author of The Railroad steampunk books and gave this one a shot. And I'm quite glad I did.

The Cold Beneath is an epistolary novel, meaning that it's written like a journal or memoir by someone who was involved in the events first hand. This is a wonderful throwback to older epistolary novels by English authors such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard and others. The main character is even English as well! This might very well have been intentional, and if so, I think it worked quite wonderfully. It was nice to read something in that old style.

The story centers around an ill fated expedition to reach the North Pole via an airship, The Northern Fancy and the disastrous results of a secondary agenda by one of the crew members. The latter is very well set up but subtle. It doesn't beat you over the head and treat you like an idiot. "See? See what's going to happen? Nudge nudge!" It's nice to have a book treat you like you are intelligent enough to pick up on the clues left around.

And yet at the same time this book is extremely character driven. Our writer and protagonist, Philip Syntax, is an inventor who sadly suffered the fate of having the credit for his own invention stolen and left bereft of his so-called friends. This could easily turn into a whiny character we want to slap upside the head, but Tonia Brown weaves him very well into a character that's sympathetic, someone we want to see get his due reward. It's a very difficult line to walk, but the epistolary writing style and excellent characterization pull it off perfectly.

In fact, all the characters are a very strong sell in this book. One of the other primary characters, American globetrotter and explorer Mr. Lightbridge is the quintessential hero type character who thrives on adventure and peril, even in his old age. Being somewhat familiar and fond of such characters, I am delighted to say that the author truly understands what it means to love adventure for it's own sake, and yet Lightbridge doesn't fall into the trap of being bland or uninteresting. Quite the contrary. Tonia Brown gives him backstory bits that really flesh him out and fascinated me. I won't spoil one part of it, but it genuinely interested me on a psychological level. That's very rare.

The technology is par the course for Tonia Brown, and by that I mean excellent. The scientific principles are fictional yet very believable. This is true steampunk. It treats the concepts from a scientific perspective and not like fantasy where it's hard to distinguish from magic. As someone that likes looking at schematics and nerdy stuff like that I really appreciate this kind of effort. Yet it doesn't get bogged down in explaining all the details. The story delivers just what you need to know in such a way that you can understand it and get interested, but not hold you hostage with tons of information.

Anyway, I mentioned zombies here, didn't I? Well, without spoiling how the story goes, something very fishy is going on aboard the Northern Fancy. A few things don't quite make sense about it. But things really get odd when one of the crewmen dies of natural causes. The medical staff find that he is absolutely dead and store his body in the freezer for proper burial upon return. Until that night a horrible screaming wakes the crew. And it's coming from the freezer. They think that somehow the medical staff mistook his state and swiftly release him. But he isn't the man that they remember him to be. Violence breaks out, and things end on a very bleak note.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. It's when the airship crashes and they are left stuck on the icy wastes of the North that things get really bad. I don't wish to spoil too much, hence my rather vague wording in some of this, because the mystery and build up are half the fun. But the spooky atmosphere are worked up beautifully and when we finally do get zombies, they aren't the stock kind that spread through bites or stuff like that. This is a unique breed with their own origin and I frigging love it. But what partly makes them so much more spooky is the fact that these ones can slagging talk! 

And that's all I'm going to reveal at present. Hopefully I've swayed you to pick up a copy. I truly do recommend it, even if you aren't a fan of horror or steampunk. It works great as those, but it also works great as a character story. It's rare to find something like this. So go take a look! You can find it here: https://amzn.to/2E8wr7p