 Recap: If you missed number two to fifty, follow the links: Part 1: 50-41 Part 2: 40-31 Part 3: 30-21 Part 4: 20-11 Part 5: 10-2 We have reached the pinnacle of our chart and the big number one. However, all fifty books are outstanding reads and great recommendations to buy for any teens in your life. But I love this more than all the others! Make sure you check the interconnecting article which features numbers 51-100 with additional commentary and observations. Huge congratulations go to…. NUMBER 1: Alden Bell – The Reapers are the Angels (2010)"So thrilled and thankful to be honored by a site I adore so much! Reapers is about finding beauty in the apocalypse—which seems like an appropriate lesson in our current landscape. When the world gets torn down to nothing, maybe something lovely will grow from the wreckage." Charts like this are always very subjective and disagreement is ultimately a good thing and in its own way every book I have mentioned is fantastic and has much to admire and worth reading. In the end of the day my aim is to encourage as many readers to try books I love within the broad remit of dark and horror YA fiction. You do not have to agree with my choices, but if you choose to take a punt on Alden Bell’s The Reapers are the Angels, I hope you love it as much as I do. There are many much better-known authors in the horror field, who have written much better known and influential zombie novels than this, but none touched my soul the way this beautiful book did. How can a zombie novel touch the soul? Read on to find out. Since I randomly stumbled upon this novel way back in 2011, I have read it four times. It is rare for me to read a book more than once and I only do so when it is a title we are studying for my Psychotronic Book Club at school. We discuss six novels in a school year and over the last ten years I have revisited The Reapers are the Angels three times with different groups of teenagers. Through reading it with my book groups I have been repeatedly stunned by the impact it can have on teenage readers. Yes, it is a zombie novel, but it also an incredibly moving and beautiful story with an ending which is so powerful you may well cry once you have read the final lines. Over the years lots of kids have admitted to shedding a tear at the bittersweet end, including my fourteen-year-old daughter, who openly bawled her eyes out. It is also one of those tales which is perfect for readers, adult or teenage, who would never ever read a zombie or horror novel in a million years. We have featured The Reapers are the Angels on Ginger Nuts before and I have said in the past, if Cormac McCarthy was to write a zombie novel, he might produce something like this. I cannot give Alden Bell’s masterpiece higher praise than that, his limited use of punctuation, in the Southern Gothic style is pitch perfect. Alden Bell is a pseudonym for Joshua Gaylord who featured at number eleven in our chart with When We Were Animals. My daughter was equally moved by that novel and interviewed Alden/Josh for Ginger Nuts and she asked him whether both books were YA novels, because it was very difficult to tell. Josh responded: “When I wrote them, I didn’t think of them as YA books. I didn’t think of them as adult books either. I just thought of them as books I would like to read. My publishers like to market them as YA/Adult crossover novels—but I’m less concerned about categories and labels. I think teenagers can certainly read them, and I think they would recognize a lot of themselves in the books. But I think that’s true of adults too. If you try to write something authentically human, then I don’t think such writing has age limits.” Like with Neil Gaiman’s Ocean at the End of the Lane, which is featured elsewhere in the top ten, I particularly love books where it is very difficult to pinpoint whether they are aimed at an adult or YA audience. The Reapers are the Angels is an exceptional example of this, my book groups would argue until the cows come home on the subject, but for myself the strength of the fifteen-year-old narrator, Temple, makes this a perfect fit for YA audience, even if it is not ‘traditional’ YA. Without exaggerating, I would rank Temple amongst my favourite ever characters in fiction, YA or otherwise. She is wracked with guilt, mostly on the run and trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world without any family. She is equally strong and vulnerable, making her the perfect character for teenagers to connect with. Interestingly, When We Were Animals also features an equally engaging teenage female lead and when we interviewed Josh, we asked him why he chose girls to lead his novels: “For my money, teenage girls are the best kinds of characters to write about. Somehow, whatever they’re doing is believable. I think it’s because teenage girls are masters of disguise—professional adopters of roles. They luxuriate in their own drama and they are taught by culture to don a different mask for every circumstance. What more could you ask from a character? Also, when I was a teenager myself, I think I was more of a teenage girl than a teenage boy. I had no idea how to interpret boys. They wanted me to hit a ball with a stick and run around in a circle.” Reapers are the Angels is different from most other zombie novels in that the creatures take a back seat and there are small signs that America is beginning to recover from the apocalypse of some years earlier. The plot revolves around Temple who had lived her entire life in the aftermath of this world changing event. She has existed and travelled by herself for most of her life, struggling to connect with the other people she meets along the way. After she kills someone in self-defence, is hunted down by a man called Moses and whilst on the run meets many characters including Maurey, who has special needs, and takes him with her on race away from Moses. Throughout the story flashbacks reveal why she decided to help Maurey and the underlying reason for her guilt. Prepare yourself for an incredible road novel across an empty America with a teenager who does not fit into the settlements which are beginning to rebuild and is more at home travelling the dangerous landscapes where there are more vicious predators than zombies. A masterpiece and one of the finest horror novels of the last decade, YA or adult. Tony Jones   THE HEART AND SOUL OF YA HORROR FICTION REVIEWS |
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