Book It: Dust by Joan Frances Turner

Dust by Joan Frances Turner

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Dust is a game changer in the world of zombie literature. It requires you to forget everything you have learned thus far about zombies. Forget the craving for brains. Nevermind the halting, staggering or the twitching, the tics and speed walking. Joan Frances Turner has written a novel that introduces you to zombies for the first time as emotional beings; they think, communicate, wonder, fight, worry, need and care. Under the decay of death the fear they instill, they are just trying to get by.


Jessie is dead. Then undead. She died young and now lives out the life of an undead in a gang of others like her, some young, some hundreds of decades old. They hunt, because of course, they are hungry but unlike many of the other gangs of undead, Jessie and her friends would rather not partake of human “hoo-meat.” When a hoo visitor raises some questions, Jessie begins searching for answers, and that search leads her to the recesses of her past and the uncertainty of her future.


Dust is both unequivocally tender and explicitly brutal. The violence is straightforward and striking; Joan uses adjectives I never want to hear or read again to describe the crushing of bones, the seeping of flesh, bodies and personalities turning to dust. The analogies are a harvest of gore, every meaning cultivating the taste of violence in your throat.

…the panic he’d barely been hiding oozing like a vein of oil into his eyes.


…this was constant, insistent, tugging at every corner of my body like a whining toddler who wouldn’t let go.


…a hand with skin like a deflated balloon sawing back and forth…


…that chemical stench…strong as a soaked cotton ball against the nose.

Turner has managed to make zombie fiction sublime and provoking literature, and in just her first novel shows her evocative talent for character creation.



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