“Asylum”–gays and zombies, oh my!

Gunnells, Mark Allan. “Asylum”, Apex Books, 2010.

 

Gays and Zombies, Oh My!

 

Amos Lassen

 

I always feel good when I find a new writer who has a good book for his debut novel but I must admit that choosing a zombie theme for a first outing can be a bit dangerous. This is simply because zombies and other super-naturals are the vogue right now and if someone does not have a new and novel approach; his book could easily be lost in the many new publications each week. Gunnells manages to avoid that by giving us a group of people that are as diverse as the colors of the rainbow and the characters are totally believable which tells us that Gunnells knows what it is to build a fiction character.

We meet Curtis, a college student, who allows himself to go to the first gay club, Asylum, he has ever visited. Jimmy, his friend wants the two guys to have a night of fun which is bound to include lots of drinking and lots of sex. What Curtis and Jimmy did not expect was an attack on the club by the risen dead. They are stuck inside with a small group of varied people—the bartender, Gil, a Vietnam vet  an older man with a Tasmanian Devil tattoo and pony tail, Madam Diva, a drag queen, Jarvis, a male stripper, Clive and Toby, a couple of pretentious queens and Devon, a disk jockey with limited sanity, Lance and Autumn, a customer and his fag hag. The siege begins and as it does we meet the characters more intimately. And here is the new approach—our crew of characters is made up of people who under ordinary circumstances would probably not get along. Each has to deal with his own personal demons and fears and still be strong enough to deal with the zombies trying to get to them. And here is the allegory—do the zombies represent homophobic persecution or are they just zombies? If they are no more than zombies, why then would they attack a gay club? There is something greater than just another zombie story here and what Gunnells does is look at society from an entirely different perspective.

I must admire the author’s originality in this book because he could have easily fallen into the zombie trap and just give us another story. Instead he has created an entire new kind of zombie story which is most definitely the product of his imagination with a moral as well. This is a short book; it comes in with only eighty-seven pages but each of those pages is a revelation that shows a new talent on the literary scene. Gunnells has a tough act to follow and I sincerely hope that he will be able to do so.