ROLLICKING RIDE
Adam Lewis Schroeder serves up a zombie thriller with a side of bacon. Plus, Helen Macdonald’s extraordinary memoir, H Is for Hawk.
Adam Lewis Schroeder ( The Empress of Asia; In the Fabled East; Kingdom of Monkeys) is one of Canada’s great storytellers: engaging, witty and surprising.
Schroeder credits his love of comics ( The Walking Dead) for this surprise of a book — a wild ride through zombie-land. So fasten your seatbelts for All-Day Breakfast, a long, strange trip through the deep weirdness of the American heartland.
It’s morning in Hoover, Neb. Peter Giller, single father of two and widower of six months, struggles to control his irritation with his visiting mother-in-law, Deb.
In a family that is almost religiously vegetarian, Deb happily suggests burgers for dinner. “Carcinogens!” Peter silently screams, mourning his young wife, dead from cancer.
Meanwhile, in the greater world, war rages in the Congo; American troops are coming home mutilated or not at all. That morning, a student proposes Peter sign her petition for a “zombie march,” protesting American involvement in Africa. Unwilling to risk his substitute job, his substitute life, Peter refuses.
The school day includes a scheduled field trip with his Chemistry 11 students to a plastics factory. Peter loathes plastics too, but dutifully searches for teaching moments. After a mysterious liquid leaks from a burst pipe, blanketing Peter, his students and Colleen, a parent volunteer, the field trip from hell concludes — almost.
That night, a clutch of high school kids in Nebraska, their science teacher and a volunteer mother seem to have joined the ranks of the damned. Smelling oddly like sawdust, the group shares an insatiable lust for bacon. Next morning, his children watching in horror as a nitrite-deprived Peter crawls across his kitchen floor, scarfing Deb’s discarded bacon strips.
Students’ limbs drop off, sometimes reattached with staples, tacks and whatever’s handy. Blood spills, lives shorten, menacing men in suits stalk Peter’s family and houses are burnt to the ground. Shedding his hard-won “decorum,” Peter turns up to teach with a hole in his chest, blood and cement on his shirt — hey, a moment’s road rage, nothing unusual. Another parent can barely whisper an insider’s tip about military experiments, meant “for the soldiers, inside,” before a yellow sports car runs him over. Suits track Peter; SWAT teams are not far behind. Manic bacon-related mayhem abounds, from the cafeteria “wiener massacre,” to 7-Elevens, a truck stop, ajail and a bacon factory, home to the newly pork-dependent.
High school zombies are rather fun, like Frankenstein in his zany adolescence. As we reel from episode to gory episode, Peter wrestles with anger issues while focusing on his goals: saving his children (with Deb’s help), his students and himself by finding a cure for his interesting new condition. (Spoiler alert: there will be brains.)
On the dark roads of Nebraska and Ohio our zombie-detective zooms around, a pretend paramedic behind the wheel of a stolen ambulance, a passel of students in back and goons in full pursuit. Peter’s ride ends on a high point, in Southern California, fitting habitat for “hippy scientists,” their evil boss and his lusty daughter.
Schroeder’s stylish zombie tale pretty well guarantees eye-popping outrageousness: All-Day Breakfast is a gross, hilarious, bacon-y pleasure. Nancy Wigston is a freelance writer living in Toronto.