A Questionable Shape

“A Questionable Shape is a novel for those who read in order to wake up to life, not escape it, for those who themselves like to explore the frontiers of the unsayable. [A Questionable Shape] is more than just a novel. It is literature. It is life.”
—Susan Hazen-Hammond, The Millions

“Bennett Sims delivers a disquisition on the idea of the zombie, combining low and high culture in a firework display of extended metaphors, obscure vocabulary and intellectual sparks. With a heavy debt to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and vigorous nods to Nabokov, Heidegger, Tarkovsky, Shklovsky, Levinas and Proust, to mention a few, the book is ambitious and thought-provoking. Sims displays a positively Will Self-ish love of words (the illuminated head of the man on a “Walk” sign is “syncarpous and starlit, a perfect oval of refulgent drupelets”) as he focuses in on the philosophical conundrum of undeath, seemingly yearning for its impossible state that is neither “Being” nor “Nothingness”. An existentialist meditation.”
—Jane Housham, The Guardian

“A Questionable Shape is a rewriting of the genre in rather literal sense… Sims’s zombie novel perhaps contains the highest proportion of great descriptions of light per page since Proust… The zombie installs at the heart of the novel a perspective from which the polymorphous dynamics of the human experience of light disappear.”
—Michael W. Clune, Los Angeles Review of Books

“A Questionable Shape made me feel like nobody else had really thought zombies through until this book: what it would be like to pass into undeath, what it would be like to lose a loved one to undeath, and what prickly moral conundrums would arise after the threat had been mostly contained… a meditation on love—filial, romantic, even bromantic—as well as life and death, memory and deterioration.”
—Joe Sacksteder, New Orleans Review

“A Questionable Shape takes place over the course of one week, during which Vermaelen is mostly occupied in assisting his friend Mazoch in the search for Mazoch’s father, who vanished from his home amidst signs of a struggle, and is now most likely one of the undead shambling from place to meaningful place in his former life… Sims is ultimately true to both his narrative and the one found in his footnotes, where both intellectual musings and horror set pieces can coexist. The resulting novel both satisfies and upends familiar tropes, reassuring even as it offers numb potential and a bleaker tomorrow.”
—Tobias Carroll, The Los Angeles Review of Books

“Equal parts David Foster Wallace and Richard Matheson […] A Questionable Shape is certainly the first Proustian zombie novel, but hopefully not the last horror novel of ideas.”
—Adrian Van Young, Slate

“Unlike anything I’d ever read… Underlying the seemingly quirky subject matter of Sims’s novel is a notable linguistic dynamism and impressive command of philosophical challenges… Sims’ work has a life of its own.”
—Meredith Turits, Full Stop

“Ambitious [and] thoughtfully rendered. Sims’s debut is essential reading.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Bennett Sims’s amazing new novel is about zombies the way Moby Dick is about whales. What we have in this book is the zombie as springboard to that rarefied air of higher planes of thinking.”
—David Breithaupt, NewPages

“A Questionable Shape presents the yang to the yin of Whitehead’s Zone One, with chess games, a dinner invitation, and even a romantic excursion… Echoes of [Thomas] Bernhard’s hammering circularity and [David Foster] Wallace’s bright mind that can’t stop making connections are both present… The point is where the mind goes, and, in that respect, Sims has his thematic territory down cold.”
—J.T. Price, The Daily Beast

“Evokes the power of David Foster Wallace with a narrative that’s cerebral, strangely beautiful, philosophical, and pretty, well, brilliant.”
—Caroline Goldstein, Bustle