A brainy book with a side of bacon
Author pens articulate take on teen zombies
All-Day Breakfast Adam Lewis Schroeder Douglas & McIntyre
Our cultural imaginings have been crammed with the undead for decades, from Romero to The Walking Dead.
The reanimated have even made their way into real life: Zombie-lovers can buy a $1,500 zombie apocalypse survival kit from Cornell University, or watch the BBC’s new reality TV series, I Survived A Zombie Apocalypse. Even Zombie haters can enjoy the genre’s more satirical offerings, of which there are also plenty: Shaun of the Dead, say, or Zombieland.
Adam Lewis Schroeder’s latest novel, All-Day Breakfast, is another in this line, a tale whose zombies fixate on bacon over brains, and whose protagonist, substitute teacher Peter Giller, remains convinced nearly the entire time he is a zombie that he is not, in fact, a zombie.
Peter Giller lives for his two children, Ray and Josie, and his wife’s death from cancer has left him with a quiet paranoia about the disease’s many triggers. He imposes a vegetarian rule over his household: Charred meat causes cancer, he tells his family, including his patient but persistent mother-in-law, Deb.
Early in the novel, Peter and his high school students go on a routine tour of Dockside Synthetics, a plastics processing plant, where they are doused with mysterious pink goo after a pipe bursts above them.
The class eats a hotdog lunch at the plant and forgets the incident until the following morning, when an odd series of symptoms appear: violent rage, limbs painlessly falling off, and insatiable cravings for salty, burnt bacon — carcinogens be damned!
It’s side-splitting stuff: students losing arms but still joking about penises, televisions being jettisoned out of windows and cafeterias being commandeered by bacon-thirsty teenagers while their similarly afflicted teacher looks on in wonder. And, since nobody is getting seriously hurt (missing limbs notwithstanding, because, again, they are painlessly lost), the 11th graders are uniformly more bemused than concerned.
In fact, Peter and his students’ situation doesn’t seem dire at all — with enough bacon to eat and enough staples to reattach limbs, the case seems to be, they can go on forever.
But soon, the source of their ailment begins to reveal itself as something rather sinister: After writing a few letters seeking the truth, Peter comes home to find his house torched. His family home destroyed and photos of his late wife disintegrated, his quest for answers becomes personal
It also becomes conspiratorial: At the scene of the crime, Peter is confronted by his neighbour, Doug, who suggests his affliction is connected to Penzler Industries, one of those monolithic, immediately evil-sounding corporations who had contracted Dockside — the site of the pink goo — for production of military-grade plastics, which, Doug says, was meant for the soldiers.
Meant to go inside the soldiers, he clarifies. And before he can say more, he’s mowed down by a bright yellow sports car.
It’s a sharp turn in a few pages, and it’s at this point that All-Day Breakfast wades away from zombie fiction and into more arcane waters, as Peter and his 11th graders find themselves — and their symptoms — connected to a labyrinthine undercover operation involving the FBI, U.S. military operations, mysterious “hippie doctors” and, ultimately, Penzler.
Schroeder switches gears from goofball comedy to oddball road-trip odyssey, losing out on laughs but retaining all of the razor-sharp, literary prose that might seem out of place if all you knew about All-Day Breakfast was that it’s a book about zombies.
This is science fiction where a roomful of decaying, stinking zombies is “astringent like a cider mill,” and where a 20-foot fibreglass Zeus sways over the undead at a theme park, “waiting to rain havoc on the unsuspecting.”
With a gaggle of superhuman, bacon-borne nitrite-hoovering zombies up against seemingly impenetrable forces, Schroeder has little choice but to lean heavily on fights, car chases and getaways. It would be 400 pages of action movie scripting if it weren’t so articulate; Schroeder makes detached limbs and coagulated purple blood downright charming.
As Peter connects the conspiratorial dots — and as limbs fall with greater frequency and 24-hour diners serving, you guessed it, all-day breakfast become fewer and further between — his prime directive becomes tracking down the folks responsible for his zombielike state and demanding a cure. “Zombielike,” because, despite his super-human strength and loose limbs, Peter maintains that zombies eat brains, not bacon. “Funny how the brain works,” Peter considers, “We each fall apart in our own time and in our own way.”
Only, for Peter and the forces he’s up against, that second bit is irreconcilable. Schroeder here constructs a crystal-clear and not altogether heavy-handed cautionary tale as old as time: the human imperative to control forces beyond ourselves is as natural and common as it is dangerous.
It’s why Peter doesn’t let his kids eat bacon (or any meat) — he couldn’t stop his wife from dying, so he’ll stop them from her fate.
Eventually, as he himself falls apart on someone else’s time and in someone else’s way, Peter is given no choice but to concede that he is a zombie, or at least something very much like it.
No man can live forever on bacon. And sometimes, we just need to shut up, give in, and give brains — mushy, mortal, fallible human brains — a chance.