The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey

While neither of these texts is therefore unique in featuring a self-aware zombie protagonist, both are distinctive due to the fact that their main character, Melanie, is a prepubescent girl who initially has no idea that she is a ‘hungry’, the novel and film’s word for zombie. Carey’s novel The Girl with all the Gifts (2014) and its 2016 cinematic adaptation directed by Colm McCarthy and written by Carey himself. Diana Rowland’s My Life as a White Trash Zombie (2011), and its multiple sequels continue the trend, as does Hugh Howey’s I, Zombie (2012) Maggie (Henry Hobson 2015), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Abigail Breslin, and, of course, the subjects of this article, M. However, the figure has increasingly appeared in recent novels and movies, including Seth Grahame-Smith’s novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) and its 2016 movie adaptation the novel and film Warm Bodies (2010, 2013), and iZombie, which appeared first as a comic series in 2010 and subsequently a television series from 2015-2019. Its origins date back at least to films like George Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985) and My Boyfriend’s Back (1993).

While The Girl with All the Giftsdiverges from YA’s most trodden paths, it may also be paving the way for equally problematic issues.Īlthough certainly not a twenty-first-century invention, the sympathetic, self-aware zombie became a staple of the genre in the new millennium.

While its portrayal of queer desire is refreshingly unusual, the novel uses zombie behavior to symbolize Melanie’s queer desires and therefore runs the risk of coding them as monstrous. In Carey’s novel, however, Melanie’s most significant relationship is with her black teacher, Miss Justineau, whom she clearly desires on a romantic and potentially sexual level-feelings she herself does not fully understand. In many of these novels, a romantic subplot between the female protagonist and a male age-mate is the most important catalyst behind the protagonist’s character arc. This journey of self-discovery is, of course, a central concern of young adult (YA) literature. Carey’s The Girl with all the Gifts(2014) and its 2016 cinematic adaptation chart a young girl’s slow acceptance of her zombie identity and the abilities and appetites that derive from it.

The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey