Everything is decaying, very little is secure. In many ways, the Seattle-set parts of the story have more in common with post-apocalyptic dramas like The Walking Dead or even Mad Max than Morlock Nights or The Difference Engine.
The zombies aren’t the main focus of the action and Priest doesn’t overload the story with gore, although there is a reasonable amount. The rotters, the Blight, and the people desperate enough to try to make a living within Seattle are all obstacles to both Zeke and Briar’s quests. Now what remains of the city is walled in, to prevent the “Blight” and the undead “rotters” it turned many of the city’s inhabitants into, from escaping. Wilkes’s late husband was an inventor who, in using his radical new mining machine, the Boneshaker, to tunnel into bank vaults, unleashed a toxic gas on Seattle. The heroine, widow Briar Wilkes, is 35 years old and looks it, and dresses in shabby men’s clothing because she has a dirty, dispiriting and low-paid job - definitely not your usual cleavage-heaving corseted moppet. There’s a refreshing lack of “cool” to this book: no parade of glamorous outfits, gadgets akin to 21st century ones or luxurious settings. What is surprising is that it’s taken Boneshaker three years to get a British release, as it’s very good (it was nominated for a Hugo Award in 2010), and features another element that’s currently popular: zombies! Genres rise and fall, and right now steampunk is having a moment, so it’s unsurprising that publishers are dusting off their American back catalogues.
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