Zombie Baseball Beatdown by Paolo Bacigalupi (review)

Rabi and his friends Miguel and Joe are just looking to improve their baseball skills on the field next to Milrow Meats, the factory farm in Iowa that produces beef to feed seven states. After a massive stink-wave emanating from the farm courses through the whole town, their investigation into what's really going on at Milrow leads them right into the path of their zombified coach, which in turn leads to the discovery of a whole herd of zombie cows, mutated by attempts to increase their productivity and ready to be ground up and distributed in a supermarket near you. The boys turn every which way in order to take down the corporation responsible, only to be thwarted by sleazy lawyers and the restless undead who've already been infected. This zombie tale is satisfyingly funny in all of the middle-school boy ways and gory enough to please fans of Left 4 Dead. Rabi and his friends are strongly characterized with vivid contexts: Rabi is half-Bengali, and he's therefore seen as an outsider and de facto nerd; Miguel and his family are undocumented immigrants, and his parents and relatives get picked up by the authorities when they try to expose the factory's shady undertakings from the inside. This facet allows Bacigalupi to add smart commentary on quotidian racism and the intensity of recent immigration laws, but the overlay gets heavy-handed when it comes to moralizing on food safety; the call-to-action epilogue is both didactic and confusing, since Rabi's disclaimer that none of this actually happened seems to be meant as a cover story but goes far enough that it actually undermines belief in the story's events. The ending, too, fizzles out into an offstage squelching of the zombie apocalypse. The book is nonetheless has possibility for introducing reluctant readers to activism through literature, as well as being a dark comedy with a bit of heart.