When I saw a book called Alice in Zombieland on a table at the RT Booklovers Convention I did such a rapid double take that I still have whiplash. That cover might just as well have been subtitled “A book specifically written to make CarrieS salivate with excitement.” I had high expectations, but the book was disappointing on many levels – unconvincing characters, unconvincing world-building, a lack of Alice in Wonderland elements (misleading titles drive me crazy) and a romance that I so very much did not care about.

The title and the cover suggest a whimsical but bloody portal story, but there’s no journey through a strange land – just gruesome violence interspersed with many chapters of high school. Alice is raised by a father who insists that he sees monsters after dark. He won’t let anyone in the family out after dark, but when Alice’s little sister wants to go to a dance recital on Alice’s birthday, Alice convinces her father to let the family go. On the way home they are attacked by monsters and Alice watches her father, mother, and eight-year-old sister being horribly killed. This was a much more gruesome scene than I expected, and it immediately takes away the “Alice in Wonderland” parallel – instead of Alice leaving her family to go on a strange journey in which she attempt to return home, Alice’s family leaves her and she stays more or less in one place, with no hope of returning to a safe life.

Alice (who insists on being called Ali from this point forward) moves in with her grandparents and starts classes at a new high school. She has an instant best friend named Kat (who is impossible to dislike) and a huge instant crush on Cole, the baddest bad boy of a group of bad boys. As it turns out, the monsters Ali’s father always claimed to see were zombies (more on this later) and Cole is the leader of a group of zombie hunters.

Before I move on to the zombie thing, I want to point out that this does not get Cole off the hook as a terrible, terrible person to date since he does in fact get in fights with other people at school just because he’s a violent guy. I know there’s a whole sub-genre of romance around The Bad Boy but I am not feeling the love here. My anti-bad-boy prejudices aside, the romance isn’t built on growing trust or friendship or rapport – it’s mostly built on ineveitability, as Alice has visions of kissing Cole and fighting alongside him and everything progresses from there.

To Showalter’s credit, she tries to twist the zombie concept, which is great because zombies have been, pardon the pun, done to death. Alas, the twist makes no sense at all. Basically, in this book, zombies only exist in the spirit world. They eat people’s spirits and “whatever they do to the spirit manifests in the flesh, causing an infection to spread from there.”

Most people can’t see the zombies but some, like Alice, her father, and Cole, can see them. These people are called Slayers, and they can leave their own bodies and fight the zombies in the spirit world while their corporeal bodies seem to be just standing or lying around. Any injuries their spirits sustain show up on their physical bodies. Meanwhile Ali’s sister who died is still dead, but pops up now and then to issue unhelpful, enigmatic warnings, and a rival group tries to capture zombies to use in experiments that involve unwilling human subjects. Also there’s an antidote for zombie bites that Slayers carry into battle – it’s a “spiritual” medicine that acts on your spirit and keeps you from being infected, but it has to be administered right away. Question – how do your clothes move into the spirit world? How does the syringe that holds the spiritual medicine move into the spirit world? No one asks these questions so I’ll never know.

I don’t even know where to start with any of this except to say that since there are police in this town, and even though the police can’t see zombies, you’d think Cole’s group could shut down the rival gang just by tipping the police off that some guys are keeping people locked up in a basement and doing un-authorized medical experiments on them. Keeping people locked up in basements is generally seen as a felony, zombies or no zombies. But no one bothers to do this because they are too busy going to parties, punching each other in a manly way, and worrying about their love lives. Honestly, not one single person in this book behaves like a real person. It’s not that I require characters who lack flaws. It’s just that the flaws should make some kind of sense in context of the characters and their situation. Nothing in this story was coherent – not the plot, not the people, not the premise.

This story might have overcome many of its flaws if it had not been so slow paced. During most of the book, nothing happens. Sometimes a book can benefit from focusing more on character development than on action, but there’s no character development either. The only things that change between Alice, Kat, and Cole is that they learn each other’s secrets and they make their relationships official – but Kat and Alice are always friends, and that friendship never changes, while Alice and Cole always have the hots for each other, and at the end they just officially have the hots for each other. The exposure of secrets doesn’t change the dynamic between people; it just removes one element of tension. Meanwhile the discussions are painfully repetitive, especially when Alice and Cole spend chapters trying to extract information from each other without revealing their own information. This would be very funny except that it goes on forever and is incredibly inane. Neither Cole nor Alice has the common sense or safety instincts of an infant when it comes to disclosing vital information.

With a title like Alice in Zombieland, I expect some sort of magical journey. It could be argued that Ali takes a psychological journey, in that she starts off as a total skeptic and ends up as a respected zombie fighter. Along the way she also has to deal with the trauma of losing her family. However, there just aren’t enough parallels to make me feel that the title fits the book. Even setting aside my disappointment with regard to expectations, and trying to view the book purely on its own merits, the book doesn’t hold up. I did finish it, but mostly out of sense of obligation, and I won’t be finishing the trilogy.

As far as I can tell, Ali and Cole are together for no reason other than that the cover copy wants them to be. I can’t understand what’s happening in this book and how the events (regular, multiple deaths, for instance) work in the context of what’s supposed to be a mundane setting. I did enjoy Kat’s character immensely, and the fact that ultimately Kat and Ali remain friends while Ali also becomes fast teammates with other girls who initially were her rivals. I also liked it that the school principal knows what’s going on and supports Cole’s team as much as she can – this solved a lot of logistical problems. Nothing else about the book worked for me at all.

Oh – with one more exception – Ali’s grandparents put every potential boyfriend through a grueling quiz, and Cole’s answers were just perfect. It was the only time in the book that I liked him. That’s the Cole I want to read about, not the Cole who gets in fights at parties.