Back in the day, they were called Marvel Zombies—those comic book zealots who were hopelessly devoted to Marvel Comics. No Ralph Dibny for them. No Darkseid, no Swamp Thing and no Batman either. It was all Reed Richards, Thanos, Man-Thing and Moon Knight. There were no copies of Eightball in their long boxes, only Speedball.
Initially it was a derisive term. If you called someone a Marvel Zombie you were questioning their taste level and dismissing their comic book cred. But in 2005 Marvel successfully flipped the script. That’s when the company published a titular series about superhero zombies. It was a big hit and spawned numerous sequels and reboots. As a result, nobody had to be embarrassed to be called a Marvel Zombie anymore.
Now we have a prose novel called The Hunger by Marsheila Rockwell. Like the comic, the zombie virus came from a piece of space rock. While investigating the crater hole in Midtown Manhattan, Captain America caught the infection first and immediately passed it along to Ant-Man. One thing led to another and all of the Avengers quickly became flesh-eating monsters. It was Spider-Man who infected Doctor Strange. The Sorcerer Supreme quickly beat a path back to his Bleecker Street mansion for a tasty snack—i.e. his friend Wong.
Within the first few pages of Rockwell’s novel, the world becomes overrun by superhero cannibals. Nobody could figure out what was going on because all the best minds had been exposed to the virus: Richards, Stark, Banner, Shuri, Nadia Pym, Lunella Lafayette—they were all “rotters.”
A small group of unlikely heroes rose from the rubble. There was goth witch Nico Minoru from the Runaways, a monster hunter named Elsa Bloodstone and—because of a little time traveling hiccup—two versions of Wade Wilson.
Most importantly, the group included Doctor Strange’s young librarian and apprentice, Zelma Stanton. She knew some of her mentor’s tricks, but most importantly she had access to the Chamber of Shadows, the Sanctum Sanctorum’s vast library of grimoires.
With these books at their fingertips, she and Nico started looking at time spells, reality-altering spells, and realm shifting spells—anything they could use to move the zombies from the here and now to the elsewhere and elsewhen.
Eventually, they concocted a plan to go back in time and nip the zombie apocalypse in the bud. They would tap into the time stream and create an infinite loop, open a portal to it, gather all the zombies together and toss them into the abyss.
It was an iffy plan. But what was the alternative? There was no Plan B. Even if it was possible, Zelma wasn’t convinced she could pull it off. To paraphrase a well-worn Spidey catchphrase: “With limited power came little ability to change things, but huge quantities of guilt.”
To be honest, The Hunger had some good moments, and a whole lot of bad moments. The good stuff was LOL funny I have to admit, but the bad stuff made me cringe.
The good stuff included an endless series of guest appearances from the expansive Marvel Universe. It also featured an improbable battle involving Fin Fang Foom and Zombie Hulk onboard La Santa Gallega in 1492.
The most ridiculous thing (a.k.a. the best thing) was when the time-traveling heroes went all the way back to 1,000,000 BC. They didn’t bump into Raquel Welch, but they did meet Odin All-Father and his Stone Age Avengers. Crazy things like that kept me reading late into the night.
But like I said, there was a lot of bad stuff in The Hunger as well. For one thing, the unending and repetitive navel-gazing wore me out. Plus, the author tried to make me care about the death of a character who wasn’t even in the story—that’s a writerly skill that most writers can’t pull off.
And finally, there were two moments in the book that were underwhelming to say the least. The first was Elsa Bloodstone’s emotion confession at the half-way point of the story. The second underwhelming moment came at the end. There’s one thing that all readers demand from a time travel story: The author needs to stick the landing. Marsheila Rockwell didn’t.
[ The Hunger / By Marsheila Rockwell / First Printing: October 2023 / ISBN: 781839082453 ]