Dread Nation

Dread Nation is a novel for young adults by the American writer Justina Ireland, published in 2018.

The book rewrites nineteenth-century American history from the point at which the dead began to walk: the Battle of Gettysburg does not end in a Union victory but in a halt, because the soldiers who died on the field got up again. The government's answer to the shamblers was to pass laws requiring Black and Native American children to be educated in combat schools, where they are trained to fight the undead and then hired out to protect white families. Jane McKeene was born two days before the dead rose and has grown up inside that arrangement, at a school in Baltimore, and her story follows what happens when she is sent away from it to a place where the people in charge have plans she has not been told about. Ireland writes the book as a Western as much as a horror story, and it treats the undead as one problem among several.