All-Day Breakfast

On a field trip to a plastics factory, Peter Giller%E2%80%94father, widower, and substitute teacher%E2%80%94and many of his students are unfortunately splashed with an experimental plastic. Soon after Peter notices strange changes in himself, such as an unquenchable thirst for bacon and unexpected bursts of violence. Also his body parts start sloughing off at random. Fortunately fingers, arms, and the like are easily stapled back in place. Unwilling to accept his fate or admit he's been turned into a zombie, he and several of his students embark in a stolen ambulance on a quest to discover what's been done to them and to find a cure. This novel is an uneven melding of zombie tropes and the film Death Becomes Her, with a brief, late-in-the-story deviation into The Island of Doctor Moreau, where creatures are vivisected as if their body parts were Lego blocks. The story flirts with some interesting concepts such as the prospect of weaponizing zombies, but the novel is overly long and burdened with characters that sound identical to one another, regardless of age or function. Accordingly, much of the sarcasm and parody falls flat, victim to the stale characterizations and inconsistent plot. (Sept.)