Boneshaker: A Novel of the Clockwork Century

Cherie Priest's Boneshaker is first and foremost a great read. For those fans of steampunk, Boneshaker has that in a unique setting: Old West Seattle in the late 1870's, a town transformed by twin disasters into a walled city, but one in which the dangers lie inside the wall instead of out. For fans of zombies, it has that in a unique way as well in the form of "rotters" (the word "zombie" never appears in the novel), people turned into the ravenous decaying undead by the deadly yellow gas called "Blight" that the wall keeps contained. And for the fans of airships, Boneshaker has them in vivid detail, magnificent and make-shift that as one would expect in the early stages of their development.But all that aside, it's the characters you meet in Boneshaker that hold it all together, that make it all believable and keep you reading. Priest clearly knows her characters, intimately, and makes them live and breathe for you. Briar Wilkes, daugher of a sheriff, Maynard Wilkes, whose last act in the disaster made him a legend; widow of Leviticus Blue, the inventive genius blamed for the disaster; and mother of Zeke Wilkes, a fourteen year-old boy who, trying to reconcile these twin legacies, goes into the walled-up zone in search of the past his mother has kept secret from him. And Briar, when she finds out what he's done, must go in after him:"She wasn't worried about her father's house; it had withstood worse. And when she got there, she wasn't even relieved to find it standing without any obvious damage. Nothing short of finding Zeke on the porch could have slowed her down.--She burst in the door and into the cold, dry interior that was every bit as empty as she'd left it.--Her hand stopped at the knob to her father's room.--There was a brief instant of hesitation, a resistance to the breaking of long-established habit.--Then she seized the knob and shoved it.--Inside, all was dark until she brought the lantern around. She left it on the bedside table and idly noted that the drawer was still open from where Zeke had stolen the old revolver Rector had mentioned. She wished he'd taken something else. The gun was an antique that had belong to Maynard's father-in-law. Maynard himself had never used it and it probably didn't even work, but, of course, Zeke wouldn't have known that.--Again she felt that stab of regret and she wished she'd told him more. Something. Anything.--When she got him back, then.--When she got him home, she'd tell him anything he wanted to know -- any story, any fact. He could have it all if he'd just make it home alive. And maybe Briar had been a terrible mother, or maybe she'd only done the best she could. It didn't matter now, when Zeke was in that toxic, walled-up city where undead Blight victims prowled for human flesh and criminal societies lurked at the bottom of rigged-up homes and cleaned-out basements.--But for all the things she'd botched, screwed up, lost, forgotten, lied about, or misled him on... she was going in there after him."In addition to the characters, Priest does an excellent job of keeping the action going, an important factor as the story takes place over just a handful of days. The pace is fast and her descriptions are vivid, lending an immediacy to things that happen as can be seen in this bit:"The sound of something clacking outside relieved everyone inside. "Did that do it? Are we loose?" Mr. Guise demanded, as if anyone knew any better than he did.--The ship itself answered them, shifting in the hole it'd broken into the side of the half-built tower. It settled and listed to the left and down. Zeke felt less like the Clementine had disengaged than that it was falling out of place. The boy's stomach sank and then soared as the airship tumbled away from the building and seemed to freefall. It caught and righted itself, and the dirigible's lower decks quit rocking like a grandmother's chair.--Zeke was going to throw up.--He could feel the vomit that he'd swallowed after watching the Chinaman's murder. It crept up his throat, burning the flesh it found and screaming demands to be let out.--"I'm going to--" he said.--"Puke in your mask and that's what you're breathing till we set you down, boy," the captain warned. "Take off your mask and you're dead."--Zeke's throat burbled, and he burped, tasting bile and whatever he'd last eaten, though he couldn't remember what that might have been. "I won't," he said, because saying the words gave his mouth something to do other than spew. "I won't throw up," he said to himself, and he hoped that he gave that impression to the rest of the men, or that they could ignore him, at least.--A left-facing thruster fired and the ship shot in a circle before stabilizing and rising.--"Smooth," that captain accused.--Parks said, "Go to hell."--"We're up," Mr. Guise announced. "We're steady."--The captain added, "And we're out of here."--"Sh[expletive]," said one of the Indian brothers. It was the first English Zeke had heard from either of their mouths, and it didn't sound good.--Zeke tried to stop himself, but he couldn't.--He asked, "What's going on?"--"Jesus," Captain Brink blasphemed with one eye on the rightmost window. "Crog and his buddy have found us. Holy hell, I figured it'd take him a little longer. Everybody buckle down. Hang on tight, or we're all of us dead."Highly recommended for fans of steampunk, zombies and airships, and for anyone who just enjoys a really good read.

In looking for a second book to read on Kindle, I fell for Amazon's trap. "Hey Jeff," they said, "if you liked Jeff Vandermeer's Finch, you might also like Cherie Priest's Boneshaker!"Huhm, I thought, looking at the cover art to Boneshaker -- a tight shot of a woman's face, a massive dirigible reflected in her goggles -- this looks kind of interesting. So I read the description, which promised a vivid steampunk America, where the Civil War dragged on for ten years and the city of Seattle was decimated a mad inventor's earth-drilling device, dubbed "the Boneshaker." A machine that apparently cracked open a cache of poisonous gas buried deep in the earth, gas that then erupted into the city and turned people into ravenous zombies called "rotters."Zombies, mad scientists and steampunk technology? Sign me up!And of course, Kindle made it all the more easy. Unlike other Amazon recommendations for books made from the guts of dead trees, there was no wait. I bought the book, woke my Kindle, and there it was sitting on my home screen.So, here's the story: Boneshaker is about a woman named Briar Wilkes, the daughter of folk hero lawman Maynard Wilkes and the widow of Leviticus Blue, inventor of the amazing Boneshaker machine. After her husband's initial test of the machine caused massive destruction and the onset of the zombie "Blight," Briar managed to escape to the city's ramshackle suburbs, now called "the Outskirts," where the surviving citizenry raised a massive wall around the infected area to keep the gas and zombies out. It's after this cataclysm that Briar learns that she's pregnant with Leviticus's son.Flash forward some fifteen years -- Briar is now a pariah for her husband's central role in creating the Blight, and she and her son Zeke are living a meager existence in the Outskirts. Tired of the constant humiliation of being the son of a mad genius who ruined a city, Zeke decides to venture back into the city to uncover some evidence to exonerate his father. Once there, we learn that there are surviving people inside the Blighted walls, called "Doornails," and that diseased city is now controlled by a mad scientist named "Dr. Minnerecht" who may in fact be Leviticus Blue in disguise.Briar then follows her son into the city in order to save him, and the two become locked into the orbit of Dr. Minnerecht, spiraling through a series of action set pieces that inevitably lead to a confrontation with both the past and present.My overall response to Boneshaker is fairly positive. It was an entertaining read, well-paced and featured some compelling characters. Briar and Zeke are both great and defy stereotypes -- the central mystery of Dr. Minnerect's identity is enough to keep turning pages, especially in the book's final act. It's also important to note that Boneshaker is strongly influenced by the 2007 video game, Bioshock -- which featured a mad inventor at the center of a crumbling city filled with zombie-like monsters and the morally-challenged survivors of the old order. Cherie Priest even gives a nod to Bioshock on her Web site, so I know I'm not crazy. This is not to say that I'm accusing Ms. Priest of ripping off Bioshock, just that its influence is strongly felt. Considering Bioshock is in many ways a response to Ayn Rand's writings, it's cool to see it feed back into literature.In terms of some issues I had with the book, my primary problem was the anachronistic use of language. Now, I'm fine with the historical divergences -- this is an alternate history steampunk novel after all. But the dialog seemed a bit too modern at times, and not at all like the words spoken by 19th Century characters. Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock, though set in a future where technology had devolved to 19th Century levels, featured characters who spoke in a believable 19th Century dialect. That's not the case here, in a book that takes place ostensibly in the 19th Century. I found that this deficiency on the part of Boneshaker took me out the book and at times compromised the believability of the world.Also the rotters, while intended to be a constant menace, don't feel all that threatening. The focus of the book is on Briar, Zeke and the people they meet inside the city -- the rotters only serve as a minor distraction. I was disappointed that there weren't stronger horror elements in the story.In addition, Priest adds an author's note at the end to defend herself and the book from perceived critics. I always hate it when a writer feels the need to offer a lengthy foreword or afterword where they largely ramble on about their own genius (see: King, Stephen). But I especially hate it when an author decides to defend their work from perceived critics in the book itself, as a way to silence any negative reviews. My advice to Ms. Priest is to grow a thicker skin -- once a creative work is out in the world, it will be criticized even by its fans (and I do count myself as a fan of Boneshaker and Cherie Priest). Especially now that we live in the Internet age, where bloggers and podcasters (like me) are free to say whatever they want about a book without a newspaper, magazine or journal to filter them out. Some critics may have a good point, and it may be worth acknowledging that some criticism is valid.However, that said, it is not enough to prevent me from recommending Boneshaker. If you want an entertaining read featuring a fully-rounded (and flawed) female protagonist in the mode of Ellen Ripley, then this is the book for you. I hope that Briar and her son Zeke put in another appearance in additional "Clockwork Century" books -- I'd hate this to be their only adventure. I look forward to seeing what great things Ms. Priest has planned for her future books.Note to Kindle readers: As always, there are some glitches and problems with the text formating. For instance, I noticed an issue where paragraphs that start with a "W" word instead rendered "w" in lower-case. I wish publishers would put a stronger effort into testing their books on Kindle and making sure the digital typesetting is as good as the print edition.

In an alternate 1860s Seattle, Briar Wilkes and her son Zeke are living hand to mouth on the outskirts of a once bustling city of the gold rush. Sixteen years previous, the city was literally torn asunder by the Boneshaker, a great drill-engine built by Briar's then husband, Dr. Blue, to mine through Alaska's ice in search of gold. This terrible disaster not only caused many deaths and ruined livelihoods but unearthed a blight gas that turns anybody who breathes it into the living dead. Now Zeke wants answers. Was his father really to blame? He heads off to the other side of the wall with an old gas mask and an antique rifle and only Briar can bring him back.Last but not least in Discovering Steampunk: Boneshaker by Cherie Priest. Boneshaker is a cleverly weaved nail-biting story full of intricacies and hidden history. Beginning with a catastrophic event that shakes the very foundations of Seattle and its' people, causing them to have to wall off the main part of the town to remove the possibility of blight contamination from the strange gas that was unearthed all those years ago, it reminded me a lot of an action-horror film.It is a fantastically written piece of fiction. It's atmospheric, chilling, and dark. The entire story has layers and hidden depths that I can only hope are explored in later books and the rich description paints such a clear picture of the environment that it is just the story and you. It is told from two perspectives, those of Briar and Zeke, and their stories are so tightly connected yet distant with entirely different voices that it really keeps the narrative ever-changing and fresh.The relationship between Briar Wilkes, and her son Ezekial is explored in depth as he runs off to recredit his family name from beyond the wall, and Briar strives to rescue him from a world of `rotters' (zombies), blight gas which turns people into rotters if breathed, and the criminals who have made a life for themselves there. It is heart-rending and gripping to the very end.Briar might actually be one of my favourite heroines in modern fiction. She reminds me of a Ripleyesque 80's action heroine, kicking arse and not just for the sake of it but because she has to. There is no romance, just a grim fight for survival of herself and her son and she is willing to do anything to save him. The strong female heroine is a very difficult trope to manage because very often it is taken too far and you know it's been used just to make a statement, or they aren't that strong at all, however, Briar is neither and I love that about her character.I would recommend Boneshaker for folk who enjoy a good adult novel. There's no sexual content but if you don't enjoy adult fiction, you won't enjoy this as it can be quite slow-going in parts. However, if that doesn't bother you, then it comes highly recommended from me as a steampunk staple. There's a bit of a horror element to it, though nothing that will have you hiding under the covers if you read it at night, there are a few zombies, a strong criminal underground, and everything fits together so well. It's easy to lose yourself in the story and forget that you're reading a work of fiction.

As the first novel in Cherie Priest's "Clockwork Century" series I was really looking forward to reading this, having previously read her intriguing short story "Reluctance" which is set in the same world.I think my anticipation was a little too high; it`s not a bad novel by any means, it just didn't quite live up to the high praise it has received in all the Steampunk reference books. As it is, the characterisations are fairly good, with a strong female leading character and her wayward son - Briar and Zeke (Ezekiel) Wilkes - and a host of interesting - if, in some cases, underdeveloped - supporting characters. The plot sags somewhat in places though, rescued mainly by set-piece scenes. There are many good ideas presented within the alternative world Priest has constructed - the Civil War, airship technology, zombies etc., but I was left feeling that the sum of parts was somewhat greater than the whole.There is a strong idea at work here - this alternative-world setting is too good to give up on - and Priest certainly shows flashes of quality in her writing which will lead me to read the next volume. "Boneshaker", however, was regrettably less earth trembling than hoped for by this reader. 3 ½ stars.

I liked the premise of 'Boneshaker' and Priest's portrayal of post-apocolyptic 19th-century Seattle and the characters who dwell there. It's a lovingly crafted book and you can tell Priest has a real fondness for the period - I just felt that it took a bit too much time to hit it's stride (as her subsequent novels have done also) which left the end feeling a little rushed. Also be warned: it's not really a zombie novel - although a zombie-type scurge does inhabit much of the city where the action occurs, but this is not the novel's central theme.

Some interesting ideas but characterisation is not great and the storyline is jumpy and poorly plotted. I got a distinct picture of 'place' so it's nicely described in parts but I couldn't escape the feeling that I knew where it was all going and was inevitably underwhelmed when the story came to a close. There are some books that I keep with the intention of reading them again. Unfortunately this isn't one of them.

I love this book. Given as a gift this book was my introduction to Cherie Priest and also the genre of steampunk. The story follows young Ezekiel as he ventures into an area teeming with the living dead. This is one of those books that I did not want to put down, and when I did have to go to work I was just counting down the hours until I could get back to the story. Since reading this novel I have brought all the other books in Priest's Clockwork Century series and am looking forward to reading them all.