The Forest of Hands and Teeth, by Carrie Ryan


Another of Gollancz’s American-originating Young Adult-ish books – the most recent I read was Graceling - which they’re aiming a bit more at the adult SF market. I like YA fiction, generally, although I read a lot less of it than I used too, but I do get a little annoyed when I read one without being warned. I suspect it’s something to do with expectations, which may not be fair – a book should be judged on what it is, not what the reader thinks it will be – but still, I was hoping for something with a bit more bite (hah!) than this. The set-up is better than average, if not exactly entirely new, amalgamating as it does a post-apocalypse setting with zombies. That may sound a little straight-forward, but there are some nice touches, and Ryan is very good at creating the sense of normality that her characters have settled into. Yes, there are the zombie-esque remains of their friends and family clustered around their little village, battering on the fence, but that’s just the way things are, and have been for some time. Something to be scared of, but nothing more than a background to life.

Of course, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to learn that things don’t remain calm for long. After a lovely beginning, in which our main character’s mother is dragged off to become a zombie, the book loses the path a little. There’s a little too much time spent with the minutiae of orphan life and religious training, and far too much time spent on the unfairness of life and, overwhelmingly, love. A few bits of mystery are scattered over this section, which are welcome, but the endless worry about which of the two local boys our heroine is in love with - and which will ask her to marry them, and which will end up with her best friend – are a little wearying. I can see what the author’s trying to do, and perhaps I’m just not the right reader (I don’t think I’ll like Twilight, either, although I shouldn’t prejudge…), but it just didn’t work for me.

Things pick up a bit when the expected catastrophe occurs, and the hormonal youths must flee the village where they’ve spent all of their lives, and head off into the titular forest. Are there other survivors out there, even though the local authorities have always said there can’t be? Will the strange numbers on the path lead to some form of salvation? Will Mary ever stop dreaming about the sea? Will she ever get to have sex with the boy she loves, even if she isn’t sure which of the two brothers that is? Do we care, or should the author just get on with what she’s good at, which is the creepy atmospherics and willingness to do horrible things to main characters? These are, in case you hadn’t guessed, rhetorical questions.

There’s much to admire here, and I suspect that if I was a lot younger, I’d have enjoyed it a lot more (especially, I suspect, if I was a young teenage girl, which I’m not). The setting is well depicted, the prose is generally solid, the characters mostly convincing (if whiny), and the horror elements are nicely underplayed, and occasionally gruesome to good effect. I just can’t help but feel that there should have been a bit more to it, and the open-ended conclusion didn’t exactly inspire me to wait with bated breath for the next instalment. Solid, and not a bad read, but not my cup of tea. I suspect it’ll be embraced by the target audience with more enthusiasm than I can muster.

I read this in a couple of days at the beginning of June, and it should be out in the first week of July, ISBN: 0575090847.