So here’s another zombie post, in which I review a total of fourteen different zombie novels (and a comic book series.) I still have Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and Simon Clark’s Blood Crazy to review, and I will get on that soon.
But without further ado, here are five more works of zombie fiction reviewed by me. Enjoy.
Down the Road -Bowie Ibarra : In the first portion of the book, a high school teacher tries to escape the zombie plague, deliberately drives over and kills a police officer, returns to his school and has porn sex with one of his co-workers, and becomes imprisoned in a POW-style camp inexplicably run by FEMA, which has become a gang of stormtrooper thugs. The book is nasty, terribly written, and brims over with the author’s hatred of authority and government. Only interesting because it might help explain the zombie-fiction lover’s urge to see a world where all rules have vanished. One minor saving grace: author has a cool name.
The Rising – Selected Scenes from the End of the World, by Brian Keene : I was in no way impressed with The Rising, the source book for this thing, which could be called Thirty-two short stories about the Siqqism. It’s a compendium of grim, depressing fragments taken from around the world as the unbeatable demon plague of corpse possession hits the planet. But when these extremely short stories are not mawkishly sentimental (two little girls avoiding the zombs and making for their magical secret clubhouse; doesn’t that make you just want to barf), or full of laboured Keene mythos explanations (which read like those sections of the Old Testament that list polysyllabic names and diet restrictions) these stories can be pretty funny.
A young man keeps a zombie prisoner so he can bore it to death with movie-talk. A zombie hates the body he inhabits; it gets worse when he becomes trapped in its severed head. A ghost directs a gang of zombies to destroy the people who raped and killed his family. My personal favourite – one of those pragmatic, outdoorsy Northern Europeans discovers a way to avoid the zombies and stay alive: move to the cold, corpse-freezing mountains and resort to cannibalism! As far as zombie fiction goes, this book is not bad at all. It’s never boring and it reads quickly.
The Walking Dead, Compendium One, by Robert Kirkman – I got this baby last Christmas, and I live in fear of the day my eight year-old sneaks it out of my nightstand. It’s the inspiration for the hit TV series, if there are a few people out there who didn’t know that. This massive, heavy book combines issues one through forty-eight of the comic book series. It follows the trials of a small group of survivors as they navigate the landscape and try to find a place to live. They try forests, seemingly deserted suburbs, fortified farms, and in perhaps the most brilliant use of metaphor in any work of zombie fiction, a maximum security penitentiary.
Wow. This is how zombie fiction should be done. The zombies are absolutely typical rotters – dead, shambling, vulnerable to headshots. The book focuses on how humans react to be trapped, being on the run, how they deal with hopelessness, fatigue, grief, hatred, insanity, and the infinitesimally rare dust-motes of happiness. The author treats the zombies as a natural phenomenon, and so they become as much a plot device as a storm or tsunami.
The book is well-done, but unrelentingly grim and full of death. Characters to whom the reader grows attached die in terrible and humiliating ways. You can almost taste the sweat, the desperation, and the danger. They’d be better off launching a full-on war of extermination against the zombies rather than stay cooped up inside staring at each other all day. It’s epic and fascinating just as a highly detailed account of Word War II is. Robert Kirkman is a fine storyteller who knows instinctively what works – he’s not writing zombie fiction; he’s writing a fabulous story that happens to use zombies as a plot device. The real story is us. It always is and has been.
My one and only mild complaint – visually, the drawing made it hard to discern between characters who looked similar to begin with: blonde women, and caucasian men with facial stubble.
Empire, by David Dunwoody – It’s 2112, and the undead have been up and active for over a century. The government has given up on coastal cities and towns, drawing in its borders towards the heartland. Death himself, riding a white horse and wielding a scythe, has come to the town of Jefferson Harbour. There’s a rich maniacal mad scientist with a brigade of zombie henchman, one of whom is his dead father with the head of a Doberman sewn on top of his body. Sounds like a great concept, doesn’t it?
This book did not work for me at all. I had a hard time getting through it, or even caring about anybody or anything. I found it irregular – flashes of good vivid writing, and then I couldn’t keep my eyes on the page.
Clearly there is a trick to writing – an author has to write so that the images translate directly into a reader’s mind; he has to write prose that does not magnetically repel your eyeballs away from the page. This did not happen here.
Like I said, it’s a good concept. Death plays in interesting role (although he is far too physically vulnerable), and at the end there is another adversary introduced who will likely play a big part in the sequel. Which I will not read, because the presentation lacked in the first book. I did my best to get into it, I really did!
Day by Day Armageddon, by JL Bourne – This was an unexpected surprise. I’d seen this book in the stores, and viewed it as ‘yet another zombie book.’
It is, in that the zombies do their usual thing: shambling, moaning, making the world dangerous, all the usual things, yadda yadda. But it’s the how that works here.
The main character is a young military man. He begins a daily journal just as the zombie plague begins.
What makes this book work is the military lore. The author seems to know about guns, the army, and how to fly planes. He makes an interesting point – that soldiers would do well in the zombie plague, not because of their combat skills, but because they have better early access to world-wide communications; they know where the bases, weapons caches, and fuel depots are; and they’ve been taught how to prepare for the worst. They know how to conserve, to divide and prioritize rations. This keeps this book interesting and lively, even if the reader is stuck wondering how the poor civilians are faring.
One rare instance of genre outside-the-box thinking: when governments nuke cities fallen to the walking dead, the radiation protects the re-animated flesh from rot much the same way as irradiated produce, thus prolonging the threat.
I’m going to read more of this series. It works and it’s exciting.
