Review: The Walking Dead on shrooms
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 26, 2014
I began reading Tom Conyer's work a few months back, with Forever Human, and then moved on to Morse Code for Cats immediately after. I gave both 5 stars, and One Shot is no different...Which is maybe odd, because they're all such different books. While they share certain themes - altered states of consciousness, mainly - they fit into (or more realistically straggle across) different genres, playing with different ideas and heading in different directions.I loved this partly because it deals with one of my favourite office fantasies: humans are wiped out and nature slowly takes back the planet.We start with a group of scientists, plus their friends and partners, working at a research base in the outback. It's never entirely clear who is sponsoring the research and why, or even exactly what is being researched. One guy seems to be working on theoretical ideas about parallel universes, while another team is synthesising viruses. Thus is is that when a research project gets into the water system and starts turning every human who drinks from it into a mindless cannibal, we're not even entirely sure whether it's the result of viral tinkering or another universe leaking into this one... Or maybe even something else entirely. Is Rex dreaming? In limbo? One of a million alternate Rexes?Most of the book centres around Rex's hallucinogenic and philosophically ambivalent journey through the desert in search of enough bullets to give himself and his dog a quick, clean death. Trudging through the heat with a series of random human, animal and ghost companions (most of whom he manages to kill off, either accidentally or on purpose), he looks back on the events that led him here, half praying for survival, half rejoicing in the destruction of the human parasites that have infested the world.As the bottled water runs low, and the animals and plants begin to reclaim human infrastructure, Rex's universe grows ever more surreal. Time slips? Hallucinations? Who knows? And when you're hiding from a herd of rampaging elephants in an outback swimming pool full of undrinkable water, who's asking?