The Forest of Hands and Teeth

#428
Title: The Forest of Hands and Teeth
Author: Carrie Ryan
Publisher: Delacorte
Year: 2009
318 pages

This has been tagged as a young adult dystopian novel, and while I agree with "young adult," it's dystopian only in the sense that all zombie novels are dystopian--a spreading horror, present or past, destroys much of civilization. Perhaps it shades slightly more into dystopian territory, in that a character alludes to the Unconsecrated--this village's name for the zombies--having originated in scientific attempts to make people immortal. However, this aside is so tangential to the action of the story, so peripheral to the central narrative, that, while intriguing, it is not a sufficiently central point to support calling this a dystopia.It is young adult horror with science fiction elements.

There are things I can live without knowing. I don't need the whole back story; in many ways it's more interesting not to have a huge revelation about the long, long ago time and how things came to be. Perhaps some of that is filled in in the next book; perhaps not. What we should have learned: Why on earth the Sisterhood allows infected people to join the Unconsecrated rather than chopping off their heads; how or why both Mary's and Gabrielle's villages are overrun; why Mary and her group of survivors assume the members of the Sisterhood who bolted themselves into the Cathedral didn't survive; why Mary thinks that Gate I would lead to the ocean. There's more, but these are the big points. More irritating, and constituting plot disruptions/bad writing: If the zombies can pile up enough to get to an upstairs story, why don't they do this with the village fences? Who does maintenance on the path fences beyond the Guardians' range? If zombies can take down sturdy, braced wooden doors in a relatively short time, why can't they take down cyclone fencing even more quickly?

Psychologically, this is a novel about claustrophobia. The (seemingly) lone village, the tiny beacon holding back the unending, zombie-filled forest. The stern and secret-keeping Sisterhood, a religious order that controls the village, its inhabitants' lives, and access to historical and current knowledge. The young girl, who wants to marry for love, break out of the village's tight periphery, and  re-discover this "ocean" her mother described to her in her childhood. It is also about selfishness; more specifically, selfishness rewarded. Mary, the protagonist, is cut from the same histrionic and narcissistic cloth as Twilight's Bella. She is moody, impulsive, self-focused and self-preoccupied, willing to put her ambivalent desires ahead of (as far as she knows) the well-being of everyone in the world. Why is Travis attractive? For the same reason Edward is: Because the female protagonist says so.

If I were still back in my text deconstructin' days, I'd say that Mary's fervent desire for a particular kind of love, bolstered by the repeated symbol of the ocean (Freud's oceanic oneness, q.v.) and the image of the ocean-like forest, is what causes the village fence to be breached, admitting the endless tide of Unconsecrated who consume or infect just about everyone, converting them from individuals to an undifferentiated, oceanic mass of zombies. In psychoanalytic terms, it's the ambivalent desire to return to the pre-individuated ego state (bonus for you Kleinians: Snapping and rending included!). Since Mary's village understands the zombies in religious terms, a translation of the above might be that desire casts one out of paradise; this Mary has original sin. While Mary doesn't lust after a creature of darkness as Bella does, this theme is present, though displaced onto Mary's mother. The story is that Mary's mother allows herself to be bitten by her husband (who is now a zombie) because Mary isn't there to stop her. Mary is too busy getting creeped out by her friend and nice-guy Harry, who in a prefiguring of this zombie/ocean trope grasps her hands under water (she's doing laundry) and initiates a courtship. However, it's not clear that Mary would have prevented her mother from being bitten by her father; Mary, though devastated, also apparently finds it all unbearably meaningful and argues with the Sisterhood, and her brother, that her mother should be permitted to join her father as part of the unknowing, uncaring zombie horde. Who can say that the addition of Mary's mother and of Gabrielle (a parallel sacrifice by the Sisterhood) isn't the tipping point that allows the Unconsecrated to breach the fence?

At the end of the novel, having navigated the oceanic forest and seeing her love interest (who turned out not to be enough for her, anyway) zombified and castrated, I mean decapitated, by her, Mary reaches the real ocean. There, she immerses herself with, incidentally, a large number of zombies and chopped-up zombie parts. Then, to the lighthouse with an older man whose job is to decapitate the zombies who wash onto the beach. It wasn't her mom she wanted all along, it was her dad! Oedipal mystery solved.

Oh, and this bears little resemblance to The Hunger Games, with which I've seen it compared. Instead, think The Road, but with zombies instead of the charred ashes of a ruined civilization, and a whiny self-serving kid. Same ending, though: It's sad about the other(s), but now you're safe because you've found another claustrophobic enclave, where you can be protected (until the horror engulfs it as well).