Last time on the Summoning, FINALLY ZOMBIES FUCK YES

“Help. Help. Me.”
I backpedaled, shimmying and kicking my bound feet to get away, match falling.

…Okay then, so the zombies want help. Chloe, why are you freaking out worse at zombies that want help when you were handling just being groped by dead things relative fine?

Found the strike strip again. Pinched the match between my fingers and . . . realized that I had no idea how to light it. Why would I? At camp, only counselors started fires. I’d never smoked a cigarette. I didn’t share other girls’ fascination with candles.
You must have done this before.
Probably, but I didn’t remember . . .
Who cares! You’ve seen it in movies, haven’t you? How hard can it be?
I pinched the match again, struck it. . . and it folded on impact.

See, the problem with Chloe’s inexperience is that I just don’t understand the point. This, in fact, is the first time it’s been halfway interesting. Matches aren’t that intuitive. Many things aren’t. And we’re taking the time here to show Chloe actually trying to deal with that.

I don’t know how much this comes across from my quotes, but this is a very dialogue-heavy story, with minimal description. Which is to say, from my point of view it reads as extremely lazy and amateurishly written. The Hunger Games was an absolutely clusterfuck on a sentence structure level, but the author could write a good quantity of narration. This author doesn’t. It’s just mostly people talking and very broad “telling” type narration.

Chloe thus far has been inexperienced with everything – peeling carrots, washing laundry, throwing out trash. But each of those things is just a throwaway mention – she says she cuts her finger, people chide her for using too much soap, and nothing at all happens with the trash beyond her actually rather ironic in context monologue about how it’s lived experience. Showing these things from Chloe’s point of view and how she fumbles to work things out would have been interesting, and could have given us a sense of how she interacts with the world and things outside her experience. Just saying she can’t do them…I still don’t understand why this is a character trait of hers. It’s so bizarre and exaggerated that I keep waiting for the reason to click and I keep coming up with nothing.

This time, I held the match lower, near the head. I struck it. Nothing. I struck again and the match head flared, singeing my fingertips, but I didn’t let go.

Of course, the reason we don’t have that is because the author honestly doesn’t seem to be much more experienced than Chloe.

Matches burn hot. As someone who’s played with them in a wide variety of unsupervised contexts, there’s a big difference between letting go of the match early (or for the slightly more self-aware, blowing it out early) because you feel the heat and are scared it’ll burn you, and holding on too long and actually getting burned. The latter is what happens if you’ve holding right under the head. Even if we assume Chloe has somehow acquired the iron will required to keep holding the match as it burns her fingers, she will be very badly burned for doing this.

More, this isn’t necessarily. The moment the matchhead flares is when it’s least likely to go out, so it’s possible to do something like drop it without the air extinguishing it. There’s no reason Chloe would have to hold it. The ground is just dirt, not mud.

She goes on to say she can’t see well in the tiny amount of light then that she does see something, and the match would actually be illuminating whatever’s crawling toward her better if she’d dropped it.

The thing raised its head. A skull stared at me, strips of blackened flesh and dirty encrusted hair hanging from it. Empty eye sockets turned my way. The jaw opened, teeth clacking as it tried to speak, uttering only that horrible, guttural groan.
“Help. Help me.”

Uh, if they’re that degraded, there’s no way it’ll be saying words. Sounds of any kind should be beyond it. I mean, forget the quality of its mouth and throat, it hasn’t got lungs.

Anyway, Chloe has yet another panic over this. Look, you already knew it was a zombie. And then you knew again it was a zombie. And now you see it’s a zombie. We get it, let’s move on.

She kicks it and it breaks. So these aren’t even physically capable zombies. Look, I will completely grant that the they’re still freaky even if they can’t hurt you, but I think actual hysteria is excessive.

Then Derek shows up. Right, he’s got superhearing. So really, the only question then is why it took him so long.

“They won’t hurt you. They aren’t brain-eating movie zombies, okay? They’re just dead bodies with their spirits returned to them.”
Just dead bodies? With their spirits returned to them? I’d sent people—ghosts—back into their corpses? I thought of what that would be like, shoved back into your decomposed body, trapped there—
“I—I—I need to send them back.”
“Yeah, that’d be the general idea.”

Oh fuck.

So the one cool thing she can do and it’s unethical. Fuck that shit.

It’s not like you can’t get good mileage out of a necromancer who’s more about sending the dead back. Sabriel showed that. But you need the dead to be an active force, one that’s fighting back instead of crawling over to try to make your job easier.

Derek has no idea how to send them back. He just says do the reverse of whatever she did before. Thanks, Derek, that wasn’t fucking obvious.

You know, Derek doesn’t need to be there. It’d have been better for Chloe to try to do that herself. She was the one who came up with the way to call them over, and she’s already tried to make them stop and go away verbally, and she’s currently backed into a corner by them. Having her put them back and then Derek showing up would have been better.

Instead she cuddles with Derek and focuses on him to block out the scary bones and then manages to do the visualization thing again, releasing the ghosts.