books

A Questionable Shape opens with: "What we know about the undead so far is this: they return to the familiar." From there, Bennett Sims's 2013 debut proceeds as a zombie novel in the same way that Moby Dick is a novel about whales - the creatures are present, but they are pretext, scaffolding for something considerably stranger and more interior.

The setup is deceptively simple. Michael Vermaelen spends a humid July week in Baton Rouge helping his friend Matt Mazoch search for Matt's missing father, who has almost certainly been infected and is now wandering, undead, back toward the sites that once meant something to him. Hurricane season is closing in, which threatens to upend the quarantine barges on the Mississippi and unleash a second wave. Meanwhile, Vermaelen's girlfriend Rachel worries that Matt's real plan, if he finds the old man, is to kill him. That is the entire plot. If you are here for gore, crossbow headshots, or boarded-up farmhouses, you should leave now.

What you get instead is a meditation on memory, loss, and the uncanny, threaded through a narrator who cannot stop thinking. Sims's undead do not hunger for brains; they retrace the routes of their former lives, drawn to nostalgically charged sites by some residue of recollection. This one idea opens onto everything else the novel cares about: how love imprints us, how grief is a form of haunting, how we are all, in our quieter moments, walking back through places that are no longer there.

The prose is the main event. Sims has a Proustian patience with light, a gift for noticing the way a dead leaf on a white sweater can appear to levitate, and a willingness to spend a paragraph on a pedestrian signal until the little white walking figure becomes an undead eye. The footnotes - modelled on Nicholson Baker rather than David Foster Wallace, whatever the comparisons insist - are where the book's philosophical engine runs loudest, roping in Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Hitchcock, Hamlet, and the CDC pamphlet FIGHT THE BITE with equal relish.

It is not a flawless performance. The hyperawareness that makes the sentences sing can also become exhausting, and the narrator's compulsion to explicate every motivation occasionally reads like a clever graduate student refusing to let a thought rest. Vermaelen himself remains oddly hollow; for a man so obsessed with the architecture of other people's memories, he has almost no family, no childhood of his own. The plot, such as it is, drifts rather than drives, and some passages feel prettier than they are profound.

Still, this is an extraordinary debut, genuinely unlike anything else the genre has produced. It is a zombie novel for people who do not read zombie novels, a philosophical novel for people allergic to the phrase. A book that earns its quiet dread by staying with the living long enough to make you feel what it would actually cost to lose one of them twice.