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wickedtrue lent me Mira Grant's Feed a few months back and then I took an embarrassing age to get around to reading it and getting it back to her, which is probably the reason there is not at least one more awesome Feed fic in this year's Yuletide archive. This is the world's loss and I will accept my just blame.

ANYWAY. First of all, what you may already know about Feed: it's a book about blogging!

Okay, what you more likely already knew is that it's a book about zombies, except it's not, really, which is one of its strongest points: it is, very explicitly, a story about a world that contains zombies, but it is not a story about zombies. Because when it comes down to it there's only so many stories about zombies you can tell (they want to eat you! They used to be people! It's very sad! You scream and run away, or shoot their heads in, or both, until you are dead or there are no more zombies), but there's an infinite number of stories you can tell about worlds that happen to have zombies in, which is probably why X With Zombies is so popular. (For example, areyoumymemmy's An Inside Look At a Main Line Society Apocalypse is a story about socialites and witty banter in a world that happens to have zombies in, which is why it's so much fun. Yes, I did just sneak a Yuletide rec into my book review. Deal with it.)

Anyway, this particular story is about a couple of bloggers who are invited to accompany a presidential candidate on a campaign trail, and then there are conspiracies and assassination attempts and so on, in a world that has adjusted to the fact that there are zombies now and we just have to live with it. The worldbuilding is detailed and thoughtful and the characters are cool - something I haven't seen dealt with much in reviews that I found especially interesting is the fact that the protagonist, news-blogger Georgia "George" Mason, has a retinal disability of the kind that entails numerous petty annoyances in her day-to-day-life, which I thought was handled really well. It's also very fast-paced, and overall, I really liked it; in fact, directly after I finished it I bought a copy to shove into the hands of my zombie-loving poli-sci major little brother.

There were, however, a few things that bothered me slightly more than nitpicks. Some are spoilery and I will ( complain about them under the cut! )

ALL THESE THINGS BEING SAID, I still would recommend the book and will definitely be reading the next in the trilogy; I also think it's a more ambitious book than the October Daye books Grant writes as Seanan McGuire, which is probably why its flaws bothered me more.

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Guys, innerbrat and I just went to see THE BEST Dracula play! I am writing it up before I forget!

They imported an impossibly tall and skinny Dracula from Italy, and the director was clearly just like "BE AS ITALIAN AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE," which as a side effect also made him the smuggest Dracula ever as he smirked and swooshed his way around the stage, swirling his enormous billowy bat-embroidered cape and followed by an overenthusiastic smoke machine, and his wig wasn't properly tamped down so we kept staring at the dollop of prosthetic standing out on his forehead

And Jonathan Harker wore dorky sweater-vests that didn't match his cravats at all, and every time he was given a task to be remotely competent at, he failed hilariously

And Van Helsing was this amazingly deadpan guy with perfect comic timing who strode around with great confidence while various characters threw themselves at him begging to be SHOWN THE WAY

And this was one of the versions where Lucy is Mina and Mina is dead before the play even begins, but we were too busy laughing to care as much as we should

But the best, THE BEST, was Renfield. Renfield was this guy, and the actor played him as kind of a cross between Hamlet and Edward Rutledge in 1776, posing and soliloquizing in the most AMAZINGLY TERRIBLE Southern accent I have ever heard. (This in a production full of dignified gentlemen in cravats pulling off fairly credible British accents.) Renfield was clearly hired for his evil laugh, and therefore his evil laugh appeared in EVERY SCENE . . . even scenes where Renfield himself did not, in fact, appear. At one point, the whole production paused for a scene where he flies halfway down the ceiling, pauses, and then flies halfway back up, cackling maniacally the whole time. IT WAS AMAZING. (As a hilarious bonus, the program provides us with the information Renfield's actor is also the youngest son of Norman Mailer.)

Oh, and did I mention that Debi and I were sitting in the very front row?

So there comes a point towards the end when everyone's in a crypt, and the stage is dark, and the lights come up and Renfield is sitting on the stage right in front of us and cackling maniacally away. So of course, I start cracking up too . . . and then it starts to feel like he's looking at me, which only makes me laugh the harder.

The production finishes up, the music from Swan Lake starts blasting (SWAN LAKE!) and I turn to Debi. "Hah, wasn't it funny how it looked like Renfield was looking at us during that cackling bit?" I say, fully prepared to believe that everyone sitting in our general section felt like he was looking right at them.

"Us? Dude," Debi says, "he was staring right at you. I think you threw the poor man off his cackle."

I OFFICIALLY OUT-CREEPED RENFIELD. *___* BEST PLAY EVER.