Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell

A Newsflesh Novella

No cover

Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell (2014, Orbit)

English language

Published May 11, 2014 by Orbit.

ISBN:
9780316380980

View on OpenLibrary

5 stars (1 review)

2 editions

Seared into my memory

5 stars

I read this when it was new, and I had a child in preschool. It was very good. And I never, ever want to read it again.

There's a zombie outbreak in an elementary school, a cascading failure of one preventative measure after another, and it follows how one teacher manages to get some of her students out alive. At a terrible cost.

It's an extended metaphor for school shootings, but years later, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, schools reopened with children entering the campus one at a time after a health screening (temperature checks, not blood tests), sanitizing everything...and then I saw a picture of a classroom with individual transparent barriers around each desk.

At least Covid doesn't turn its victims into mindless killing machines.

Cross-posted on my website

Subjects

  • Fiction, horror