bookgazing | Boneshaker - Cherie Priest

Plot Summary

During the last years of the gold rush a man named Leviticus Blue unleashed a powerful drilling machine which collapsed the city of Seattle. The machine hit an unstoppable source of poisonous gas that killed many of the cities inhabitants, before turning them into flesh obsessed zombies, or ‘rotters’. In the confusion Leviticus Blue disappeared, as did a large amount of money from the city’s banks.

Sixteen year on and a giant wall has been built around the city to contain the gas. The citizens of Seattle have mostly been evacuated. While many left the area, others including Leviticus’ widow Briar and her son Ezekiel, have made lives for themselves in the Outskirts, the poor district around the wall. Briar and Zeke are reviled outsiders and eventually Zeke, unable to stand life as it is, sets out to prove his father didn’t deliberately destroy the city. In order to prove this he ventures inside the walled city through the underground tunnel system, where some people still live. When an earthquake cuts off his escape route Briar must find a way into the city to save her son.

Specifically Steam Punk Features

Tunnels: A very elaborate system of tunnels keep the people who live behind the wall from having to go topside among the rotters.

Alternate history: The whole idea of Seattle as a destroyed, walled city is an alternate version of our world, but Cherie Priest has also played about with the real life timeline of Seattle, to make this book’s plot work.

Machines and steam power: There are blimps! Steam punk novels are always better with blimps in my opinion.

Supernatural elements: From what I’ve read so far zombies are the most popular supernatural element to include in steam punk and here they are again.

Opinion

‘Boneshaker’ is essentially pioneer town fiction crossed with steam punk. Hammered down, hard working, essentially good, yet unable to communicate openly; Briar is a typical hardscrabble pioneer heroine beaten into shape by circumstances that make her life even harder than the other inhabitants of the Outskirts. Cherie Priest doesn’t reinvent the kind of stock woman found in novels about pioneer towns, because she sees the truth the cliche obscures. Lone women living in makeshift communities had to harden themselves and barrel through life, often with little support as they routinely faced suspicion, because of their single status. Instead Priest works hard to make Briar’s hard, but hurt personality as fully realised as possible, by truthfully exploring Briar’s feelings and emotional limits.

Briar constantly struggles to be uncompromising honest, but this noble attempt is hampered by the pain she feels about the past. Her struggle to remain both honest and emotionally safe informs all her relationships; her honest reaction when Zeke asks her to explore painful memories is as much a barricade between her and the pain, as it is her attempt to answer truthfully:

‘ Did his father really make the terrible machine that broke the city until pieces of it fell into the earth? Did he really bring the Blight?

“Yes,” she had to tell him. “Yes, it happened that way, but I don’t know why. He never did tell me. Please don’t ask me anymore.”

He never did ask for more, even though Briar sometimes wished he would.' .

One of the most interesting aspects of the book is watching Briar cast aside her hard won monotonous stability to save her son and yet continue to hold back aspects of her internal life from the friends she makes as she searches for him, even though revealing certain things might make her time in the city easier. once Zeke goes missing she realises the difference between privacy and exclusion, as well as the necessity of facing a story rather than ignoring it, but throughout the novel Briar is still engaged in a personal battle, as she tries to maintain the privacy she’s created as a reaction to being the widow of a monster, while engaging with others as friends. Briar’s emotional journey is what makes this book so special, as she changes from a closed down woman, to a hard woman who can still actively care about others despite knowing how fraught personal connections can be.

To encourage readers to care about this dense emotional journey Priest creates a way for readers to connect with Briar’s character through the writing style she uses to describe her heroine’s thoughts and actions. Briar is a woman of few words and when she speaks she tries to do so in a sparingly rational way. To match the way she speaks Priest describes the majority of Briar’s actions and thoughts with precise images that do not waste words, using phrases such as ‘…with words she’d measured as neatly as buttonholes…’ . These images produce striking mental pictures and convey how exact Briar’s thoughts are. Using such a contracted version of description also communicates the coiled power readers are encouraged to feel within Briar. This particular style of description is designed to provide a deeper explanation of Briar’s character, that goes beyond the actual words of dialogue and thought process she uses. It works well as it’s surprisingly easy to understand what drove Briar to exist for the past sixteen years, what she values and how interactions make her feel.

Priest’s precise writing style also makes it easy to visualise the world she has created. While her writing style is never sparse it is highly controlled:

‘The sun was rising slowly and the sky was taking on the milky gray daytime hue that it would never shake, not until spring. Rain spit sideways, cast sharply by the wind…’

and Priest concentrates on finding one perfect word, where other authors might use three. Using only the most apt words to describe the texture, the colours and the mood of places makes it easy to picture the world Briar and Zeke live in. Each description of the landscape, the buildings and even the character’s clothes is part of a determined aesthetic reflection of the threatened lives that people lead in the Outskirts and the city which again helps readers to understand the characters better.

While many novels that use description to create dark, moody worlds feel deliberately atmospheric, Priest’s writing style feels different, lighter somehow, less obviously constructed. By disassociating her dark descriptions of Seattle from the heavy foreshadowing of a traditional dark and horrifying situation Priest allows the action to flow at the fast pace that zombie chases and air crashes need to race by at. Her style reminds me of Joe Hill’s ‘Heart Shaped Box’ which contains ordinary American characters, dialogue and situations to lessen the heavy oppression that atmospheric writing places on a story, without losing the opportunity to scare readers. Cherie Priest makes horror, darkness and depression yet another part of everyday life that need to be plowed through, rather than special, escapable events that are heavily signalled. She places realism in fantasy and terrifying adventure in the everyday, in ‘Boneshaker’ bravery is just common place decency or survival. There’s no escape for the reader, nothing to do but go with Briar and her son on the horrifying escape attempt they’ve become involved in. It’s an exciting ride and the many battles with rotters and the villains that live beneath the city are just as skilfully executed as the rest of the writing:

‘ From inside the lift, a mournful groan came echoing. Pounding hands beat at the roof above, or from some toher spot around the lift’s basket. Then there was a splintering, breaking smash…and they came tumbling inside. One or two blazed the trail, and then they poured in greater numbers through whatever passage they’d forced.

The first three rotters off the lift and into the corridor were once a soldier, a barber, and a Chinaman. Briar pumped the rifle and aimed it fast, catching the first two in the eyes and blowing off the third one’s ear.’ .

Perhaps as exciting as the action is the diversity of Priest’s alternate Seattle. A genuine effort is made to present a world where racial diversity exists and every character isn’t white, or of an unspecified race. Priest includes a large Chinese community living beneath the walled city, a black airship captain and a Native American princess. She also writes Briar and Zeke as extremely poor characters. As Aarti noted in the comments the other week steam punk generally has characters who are upper class (although ‘Leviathan’ starts to look at the class divide as well), so it’s interesting to see a single parent family, living on a low wage as the hero and heroine of a steam punk novel. Finally it’s so positive and different that the gun blasting, brave heroine, who is probably inspiring romantic feelings at the end of the novel (please don’t disappoint my romantic hopes Cherie Priest), is described as looking ‘thirty-five and she did not look a minute younger’.

‘Boneshaker’ is an excellent crossover novel that both adults and teenagers might enjoy. Emotional complexity mixes with zombie battles and by the end of the book you’ll just want more. Even though the novel works perfectly well as an open ended stand alone piece I’m happy that there’s a sequel to be released next year called ‘Clementine’. It’s named after one of the blimps in ‘Boneshaker’ and as I mentioned above that a steam punk novel is always better with blimps don’t expect me to wait for the paperback.