The Boy on the Bridge Is a Worthy Companion to One of the Best Zombie Novels in Years

Someday soon, a mutated form of Ophiocordyceps fungus turns most of Earth’s population into rabid “hungries” with no higher brain functions and a taste for human flesh. In a desperate mission, the fortified city of Beacon sends out the APC Rosalind Franklin, a team of researchers, soldiers, and a 10-year-old savant named Steven to study the hungries in their natural habitat—the now decimated suburban cities of a near-future England—hoping to find some way to preserve humanity. On a recon mission, Steven encounters a girl who seems sapient, but with similar biology to the hungries, leading him to develop a theory about a possible cure. But tempers flare both inside and outside the Rosalind Franklin as the isolation and Steven’s habit of keeping things to himself cause the situation to escalate into violence, with the fate of both human beings and the group of apparently intelligent feral hungries in the balance.
There’s an odd beauty to Carey’s desolate landscapes. As most humans have been evacuated to major population centers, the towns the Rosalind Franklin rolls through are being reclaimed by the wilderness. The mannequins of an abandoned department store are “decked out in their peacock finery,” and an early specimen hunt by the crew offers a certain twisted poetry to it, as “a reddish brown mist hanging in the air” and they are surprised by the sudden interruption of a huge, majestic stag. The environment shivers with a sense of isolation and loneliness—despite intermittent radio conversations with home base, the Rosie‘s crew is utterly alone in this strange land.

That sense of detachment drives the tension of the narrative. Conflicts escalate slowly between the crewmembers, who bicker over procedure and chain of command as they rumble along, collecting samples. But as the feral children start to pop up more, and the communications with home base grow less frequent and more ominous, the pressure-cooker environment of the rolling lab cracks open into horrible—yet inevitable—warfare against threats internal and external. The soldiers’ nickname for their child savant, “the robot,”  begins as a mean-spirited dig, but soon becomes an indicator of how inhuman they think he is, and what that might mean for the fate of the mission.
The Boy on the Bridge is a fascinating look at a group of people forced together into a tense situation, equal parts claustrophobic character drama, slow-burning cat-and-mouse thriller, and post-apocalyptic road trip. With unusual poetry and constantly building tension, it is an engaging and revealing expansion of a unique entry in the zombie canon.
The Boy on the Bridge is available May 4 in a signed edition from Barnes & Noble.