I, for some ungodly reason, decided to do Eat Brains Love. Just for some background: Last year, I read 27 of the terrible YA novels they put up in the library. And they were bad. (adopt faux-serious look here) I have seen Hell, and the devil is a 43 year old suburban mom who thinks she understands social media. (end serious look) This one was easily the worst at first glance, but later, I discovered the subtle art hidden within.

Needless to say, this book is bad. I could rant for hours about the cliché romance arc, the horribly shoehorned psychic system, the flat, 1980s-esque high schooler stereotypes, or the dialogue, oh God the dialogue. But we have 21 other presentations to get through today, so I’ll just say a little about the book’s surface level, then I’ll get to my main point.

The setting: American high school. Main characters: slacker guy and popular girl. Nothing special. I’ll skip over most of the plot, because it’s not really important, nor is it interesting. Gets infected with zombie virus, confusion and running around randomly, kills a guy in a morgue, find more experienced zombies (easily the best characters in the book), inevitably screw it up for them, badly written romance arc, go to the zombie haven of Iowa (insert Iowa joke here), get chased to a barn by the government, insert fight scene here, setup for the sequel.

(This bit should be read progressively more angrily, just a touch at first, but soon progressing to the point it’s very clear I’m irritated. Get a bit flustered at the last quote too.)
But the thing is, it’s not just bad, it’s egregiously so. It’s baffling how this book happened.
For example, the quote “Now I have my own Etsy store selling crocheted pot holders with portraits of feminist heroes” Someone had to wake up and decide “you know what, I’m putting this down on a page for the world to see”. And then an editor and a publisher had to say “Yeah, this sounds good, let’s publish this”.

(step back for a moment, as if to regain composure)
Now, this may seem like I’m not going anywhere. But, I think this book really says something about human culture in general, and greed in particular. You just have to look a bit deeper, and it all makes sense. It’s presented as an unconventional love story, but really, it’s a tragedy. The key object here is the movie. Its existence solidifies the fact that this is a pure money grab. Before it could’ve been just a bad fanfic in book form. But this movie proves it exists purely to target a demographic. And the worst part? The author didn’t want this. You can see it if you look a little deeper into the book. For example, the use of a Grateful Dead lyric in such an awkward and shallow way in the first pages subtly hints at this book’s true purpose.  It illustrates a bizarro world where all art is shallow and easy to understand and commercialize. Add in the sheer one-dimensional flanderization that drives the characters. With this, it criticizes itself. He didn’t want to write this. He had dreams at one point. He did have to get up one day and decide to write this, and he hated every minute of it. He could’ve made much better. If you look closely, you can see the potential. But due to financial problems, or his publisher’s greed, or something else, that didn’t happen. But he still managed to sneak a few clues past his editor, for the lucky few that know where to look.  The story arc where a higher-up in the government organization turns evil and forces the psychics to aid in unethical experiments on the zombies and the Etsy quote from earlier are perfect examples. It’s so bad, it couldn’t have been written seriously, which only adds to the extremely subtle symbolism. It’s all right there, just below the surface, waiting for the observant reader to find. (sigh) Ultimately, the message of this book is to remember all the art we’ve lost due to greed. It is its own eulogy. It speaks for every book, every painting, every song that never saw the light of day for financial reasons. This book gives these voiceless works a voice. It’s a testament to what could have been. It’s not only a work of art, it’s a masterpiece of subtle criticism of the system which created it in the first place.