255 pages
Published 2024
Read from June 2 to June 6
Rating: 4 out of 5
Back in the bad old days, the only queer representation (at least in fantasy and science fiction) was found in villains. Almost every Disney villain, most Bond villains, every simpering, scheming advisor bending the ear of the king — all of them queer-coded. You had outlier authors like Samuel R. Delany and Elizabeth A. Lynn, and the short fiction market has always been more progressive than what we get in novels or movies, but for the most part, the public saw villains.
As a reaction against that, when queer-forward speculative fiction finally found a toehold in the 2010s, our representation tended toward the virtuous: squeaky-clean heroes whose hearts are always in the right place, even if sometimes they need a serious conversation to correct a misunderstanding. That was an important step forward, a way to reframe queerness and shed its old popular associations, but it was only the first step. Plus it led to moments like in Steven Universe, when star-colonizing genocidists get forgiven and welcomed into the family because they said they were sorry.
Here and there, especially in the indie presses, we’re starting to see an uptick of messy, complicated, multidimensional queer characters. The Z Word is firmly in this category, with an emphasis on the messy. Right from the start, our narrator is a walking disaster, making a hash of her life, self-sabotaging, burning bridges in the small queer community of San Lazaro. The queer community is full of people dating each other’s exes, because who else is there to date? No one is a paragon. Just because someone is an impossibly hot drag queen doesn’t mean they’re good at sex.
King-Miller takes these messy characters and pulls no emotional punches, either during the zombie apocalypse they find themselves in or the societal bigotry that feeds into the violence. The cops are certainly not on our side, neither before nor during the collapse of society. Rainbow-washed corporations in particular have a sinister impact on the final Pride month in San Lazaro. Zombies are updated here as a metaphor for the way capitalism repackages community as a commodity, how it uses us up and throws us away when it’s convenient.
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