Zombie Baseball Beatdown, by Paolo Bacigalupi

I’m not sure what motivated Hugo and Nebula Award winning author Paolo Bacigalupi to write a monster creature book geared at middle school kids, but I’m glad he did, because Zombie Baseball Beatdown is a smart, funny and well written tale that does a whole lot more than just conjure up the zombie apocalypse.

Rabi is not the best batter on his Little League team; he’s more a numbers guy. His friend Miguel is the slugger of the bunch. But the star of the team is Sammy Riggoni, not because he’s the best player but because his dad runs the huge meatpacking plant, Milrow Meats, and is the richest man in Delbe, Iowa. Which also means that Sammy is a jerk and a bully, especially to Rabi and Miguel and any other player whose parents weren’t born in the United States.

Still, it was shaping up to be a rather ordinary, uneventful summer. The team sucks, like usual. The days are hot and lazy, like usual. Sammy and his cronies are barely tolerable, as always. But then something happens. Something stinky. Literally. One day, a smell wafts over the town – a horrible, gagging, infinitely worse-than-normal-even-for-a-meatpacking-plant smell that drives the workers out of the plant and sets off sirens inside. Milrow claims that it was merely an unfortunate circumstance brought on by mechanical work that inadvertently opened long enclosed systems. The public was at no risk they assured the town, and by nightfall the smell had pretty much blown away. But the workers – they are scared. They, including Miguel’s uncle, tell of a strangeness in the plant that has many of the workers spooked; that something is happening at the plant, something that is secret, and wrong.

But secrets tend to leak out in ways that are not successfully anticipated – or in any way expected.
So when Rabi, Miguel and their geeky teammate Joe find themselves on the lam after a sudden ICE sweep of Miguel’s neighborhood, they think it’s strange to find their Little League coach, Mr. Cocoran, wandering disoriented in the corn fields near Milrow’s holding pens. Coach Cocoran works at Milrow, in the R&D department, but that’s no reason for him to be out in the corn.

It’s not until Coach Cocoran attempts to eat their brains that the boys realize that the summer is not going to be quite so boring after all…
A rollicking, smart ass, fast moving zombie story with twists and turns that are frightening in how believable they are – one would think that’s enough, eh? But not for author Bacigalupi. In a completely seamless fashion, he also folds in such immediate and layered issues such as illegal immigration, corporate experimentation and a lack of regulative oversight, crop manipulation, genetic mutation (of crops and livestock), poverty as it affects the family, prejudice, bullying… but it all works. Interrelated in the story as it is in real life. And best of all – it’s entertaining. And full of the kind of morality that kids recognize, that they are drawn to because it makes sense. Teamwork. Friendship. Integrity.

It’s all there, and it’s funny and scary and gory to boot.
Kids are gonna love it. I loved it! I’m sure you will, too.

~ Sharon Browning