A young woman boards the Royal Mail Ship Titanic, bound for America, idly scratching her neck. She’s been bitten, but she doesn’t know what by. And there was a strange man with a syringe… As the Titanic steams ahead towards its doom, the lads of the White Star Line will soon have another problem on their hands: an appalling outbreak of madness and cannibalism When the young woman collapses on the boat deck, she’s taken to a medbay — but despite being declared ‘dead’, she revives like a bad economic theory and begins gnawing on the medical staff. The White Star’s finest are baffled, and try to contain the Afflicted, but since that wouldn’t be much of a novel there’s a mistake made, an escape effected, and soon Second Officer Charlies Lightoller (“Lights”) is grimly stalking the corridors doing his best Left for Dead run. (At least, between efforts to light his pipe which borders on a running joke.)

This is an odd little story, a mix of historical fiction and horror that manages to be almost comic in its juxtaposition of zombies and the Titanic. The Big Serious Historical Events are still happening in the background, though Lights and another officer are down attacking well-dressed zombie hordes with Webley pistols and fire axes when the ship has its lethal sideswipe with the iceberg, and though they’re distantly aware something serious happened — especially Lights, who gets trapped in a room by a mob of zombies and has to make an escape through the rapidly rising and extremely cold north Atlantic water now filling the deck — they don’t learn of how truly doomed they are until they escape back to the boat deck. I wondered if perhaps the number of people being eaten or zombified meant that more people would be able to escape to the boats (there being less competition) , but the fact that zombie bites took a bit to manifest into full sickness meant that normal-looking people could turn undead, so those in the boats are even more paranoid. The growing epidemic which is filling the corridors with bones and blood also forces Captain Smith to keep the steam engines moving at full blast, in hopes of arriving in New York and finding medical help or more armed men, so there’s even less reaction time to the spotting of the berg than in real life. A lot of dialogue, personality, and scenes appear to have been borrowed from the James Cameron movie, Titanic: Margaret’s Brown appeal to her lifeboat neighbors is nearly word for word as the movie (as I remember it, anyway), and the scene of Thomas Andrews standing at the fireplace in the smoking lounge and then slowly turning is repeated here, only for horror effect: the poor engineer has been bitten is about to fall into the madness. Although my Titanic buff self noticed some historical irregularities (Smith having all four iceberg warnings when only two made it to the board, staff members and Ismay having posession of one of the others) this is Titanic with Zombies, so …strict attention to detail need not apply.

This is a curious book, fun in its way: I don’t know how other serious Titanic buffs would like it, perhaps thinking it a mockery, but I enjoyed it for its goofiness. Given that Lights is a slight hero of mine — he survived the sinking and later participated in the Dunkirk boatlift using his personal sailboat — I also liked seeing him in action hero mode here. I discovered that “Tiitanic but with Zombies” is something of a micro-genre on Aamzon, and have — since I finished this Friday lunch — read another, one that was far more serious.

If you don’t know Lights, this is his portrayal in the Cameron movie, but BE AWARE the movie defames his character: the actor ad-libbed a line that makes him come off rather badly.