Tagged: zombies

After the End by Bonnie Dee

After the End by Bonnie Dee(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)

The end of the world is only the beginning.

Zombies are on the loose and the world comes unraveled. A group of strangers on a Manhattan subway are brought together in the name of survival following the lead of Ari Brenner, a young man who represents authority because of his army uniform. Even though Ari doesn’t feel worthy of their trust, he steps up during the crisis as he’s been trained to do.

College student Lila Teske finds her non-violent beliefs tested in the crucible of a zombie attack as she takes her place fighting by Ari’s side. There are other members of the diverse group, but the focus of the story is on Lila and Ari, young people who learn about sacrifice, inner strength and even love during their ordeal.

With infrastructure down and communication with the outside world broken, the survivors head toward the nearest marina to escape New York. When they meet a lab tech who may know the key to defeating the virus, he must be protected at all costs. But the reanimated dead aren’t the only danger that impedes them on their perilous journey.

[Full disclosure: I requested and received a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.]

It’s actually kind of funny that I found this book on NetGalley because 3-4 years ago I read an excerpt from the original version.  The voice of the author was so unique that even though I didn’t have money to buy it at the time, it’s been on my list for a while.  So when I saw a chance to read the whole book (a new revised edition, mind you), I leaped at the chance.

First off, Bonnie Dee’s zombies are not your typical zombies.  They’re a little smarter and are surprisingly strong, but what really stood out for me was how you kill them.  Just disabling their brain doesn’t work; you have to go for their spinal column to get to their so-called ‘primitive’ or reptilian brain that drives them.  So having a bunch of guns and some sharpshooters isn’t necessarily going to save your butt this time like in so many zombie books.  They’re also a little smarter and some of them are quite strong, so you’ve got the makings of a perfectly terrifying apocalyptic scenario.

So while the zombies and general world-building was good, my relationship with the characters was so-so at best.  Ari and Lila were both very good, solid characters with lots of development.  Ari has to fit into his unasked for leadership role as the only man with military training around and Lila has to reconcile the new everyday violence with her pacifist tendencies.  If they don’t succeed in changing, they’re all going to die.  There’s a definite romantic element to the plot as Ari and Lila become close, but it’s not always the main focus.  The main focus is survival.

That was the really good part of the characterization.  The bad part is that for her secondary characters, Bonnie Dee tends to use stereotypes.  The pampered model, the cute and helpless kid, the scientist with the cure, the disgruntled teenager, etc.  I would have liked her to flesh out her secondary characters a whole lot more, but she never really did.  There was so much potential with many of these characters that was never lived up to, so in a way the characterization was rather disappointing when you compare it to that of the two main characters.

However, the plot is incredibly fast-paced.  Bonnie Dee grabs you into her story and doesn’t let you go until you’re done reading.  There’s a constant undercurrent of tension from the very real threat of the zombies as well as the many interpersonal conflicts that crop up in a diverse group of survivors.  She has an excellent writing style that describes things in detail without ever really letting go of the fast pace.  Thankfully, there was no middle sag in this book either as Ari’s group got their footing.  It’s fast-paced pretty much all the time, which is what you really want in a post-apocalyptic novel.

So overall, I was pretty happy with how After the End turned out.  The main characters were good, the zombies were terrifying and new and the plot was insanely fast-paced.  The only real letdown was the secondary characters, which could have had so much more depth and added so much more to the story.

I give this book 4/5 stars.

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Zombies: More Recent Dead by Paula Guran

Zombies More Recent Dead by Paula Guran(Cover picture courtesy of Prime Books.)

The living dead are more alive than ever! Zombies have become more than an iconic monster for the twenty-first century: they are now a phenomenon constantly revealing as much about ourselves – and our fascination with death, resurrection, and survival – as our love for the supernatural or post-apocalyptic speculation. Our most imaginative literary minds have been devoured by these incredible creatures and produced exciting, insightful, and unflinching new works of zombie fiction. We’ve again dug up the best stories published in the last few years and compiled them into an anthology to feed your insatiable hunger…

[Full disclosure: I requested and received a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.]

I’ve been suffering from a severe case of Walking Dead withdrawal for a few months, so I figured that I might as well get back into that zombie kind of mood with a new anthology from some well-known authors.  Jonathon Maberry, Neil Gaiman and so many more authors that I actually like were included in this anthology.  Where could it go wrong?

Apparently, almost everywhere.  This is a non-traditional zombie anthology, which I knew when I requested it.  All of these zombies are either thinking zombies or just kind of dead shells of their former selves come back to life.  I don’t mind reading about these types of zombies.  It’s a newer (more terrifying in some ways) take on a creature that is a little over-hyped by pop culture.  Of course, being that people are people, sometimes they would do disgusting things with these zombies: have sex with them, make them servants, etc.  It’s sad to see that my faith in the worst impulses of humanity is still justified.

Except, by the end of the anthology, I was really, truly struggling to finish it.  This is not a long book, by the way.  It’s only 480 pages and it should not have taken me so long to finish, but I really had to force myself to keep reading about 2/3s of the way through.  Why?  Because, for the most part, it was boring.  Most of the stories, even by authors that I really liked, were quite boring.  Yes, they showcased the new type of zombie very well but some of them didn’t seem to have a point (or a plot) and still others were so boring that you forgot how the story began by the time you got to the end.  It’s not like I have a short attention span, either.

None of the characters really stood out for me here and even though it’s only been a week since I read this, I couldn’t really name more than two or three of them.  This anthology just did not pack the punch I’ve come to expect from authors like this.  In the end, I was more disappointed than entertained, which is not something you want when you’ve just read through almost 500 pages.

I give this anthology 3/5 stars.

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Zomburbia by Adam J. Gallardo

Zomburbia by Adam Gallardo(Cover picture courtesy of 100 Industries.)

 

Lifeless. Slow-moving. Brain-dead.
Welcome To Zomburbia.

My name is Courtney Hart, and I’m here to tell you about things that suck. Being born in a podunk town like Salem, Oregon, for one. Living in a world infested with zombies? That, too. And the meat heads I go to school with? I think I’d actually take the undead over them most days. But I have a plan to get out of here and move to New York. I just have to keep selling Vitamin Z along with your fries at The Bully Burger. The secret ingredient? Zombie brains.

I’ve noticed things are getting even worse lately, if that’s even possible. The zombies seem to be getting smarter and faster. If I can avoid being arrested, eaten by shufflers, or catching the eye of some stupid boy, I should be able to make it through finals week still breathing. . .

[Full disclosure: I requested and received a free ebook copy of this novel through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.]

Sometimes you read a blurb and think a novel has a good premise.  However when you read that book you learn that you have a huge, insurmountable problem with it: the narrator.

Courtney is snarky, constantly putting her friends down, arrogant, clueless, bratty, hot-tempered and thoughtless.  So she’s pretty much your typical teenager except for the fact that throughout the novel I kept wishing for her to die because she was so awful.  I can’t go into much detail because I don’t want to get into too many spoilers, but it’s hard to believe she went through so many traumatic, possibly life-changing events and came out exactly the same at the end of the novel.  As I’ve said before, I don’t mind unsympathetic characters (like Jorg from Prince of Thorns) but Courtney is just intolerable.  She’s your typical teenager with attitude magnified by 10 and given an added dose of blindness about the world around her.

Being stuck in the head of such a horrible human being for the whole novel was trying.  I kept fruitlessly wishing she’d die so I could get in the head of someone who at least acted like a human, like Willie or even Brandon.  But no such luck; Courtney lives while people around her die like flies.  The only mildly interesting thing about her is that she thinks she has a plan to fix the zombie problem.  She goes on and on about how much smarter she is than everyone and yet we never hear the details of this wonderful plan that hinges on the army clearing New York of all its zombies in the next year or so.

Okay, even with that wretched girl for a narrator, this book may have redeemed itself with a good premise.  I’ll admit that it doesn’t have a bad premise, just not a great one.  If everyone has moved out into the suburbs because the cities are infested with zombies, why don’t the zombies follow them into the suburbs?  Predators like to go where the food is, especially when said food is wandering around near wooded areas where there’s lots of shelter.

As for the drug Vitamin Z, I’ve never underestimated the determination of people to get high.  Yes, I believe that people would try to get high off zombie brains but I also think Gallardo needed to explain more of why the drug makes people act like they do when they’re on it.  That could be in the next installment of the series, but I’m not so curious as to consider reading the sequel.  Not unless Courtney gets a personality transplant.

This book doesn’t come out until August 26 but I can’t honestly recommend it to anyone.  Courtney is a rather poor excuse for a human being and the plot isn’t even all that exciting.  To top it all off, the zombies (while having some unique qualities like being able to lay ambushes it seems) are pretty boring.  They show up when it’s convenient for the plot and that’s about it.  We’re told that they seem to be evolving pack behaviour and see that actually happen during the novel but we’re told exactly 0 about it or its possible consequences.  And that’s pretty much how the whole novel goes, in one big cycle where we end up back at square one in the end.

I give this book 1/5 stars.

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Autumn: Disintegration by David Moody

Autumn; Disintegration by David Moody(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)

Autumn: Disintegration is the penultimate chapter in David Moody’s riveting horror series!

Forty days have passed since the world died. Billions of corpses walk the Earth. Everything is disintegrating. . . .

A group of eleven men and women have survived against the odds. On an almost daily basis, they attack the dead with brutal ferocity, tearing through them with utter contempt.
Somewhere nearby, out of sight and out of earshot, is another group that has adopted a completely different survival strategy. Where the others have used brutality and strength, these people have demonstrated subtlety, planning, and tactics.

A series of horrific events force the two groups together. Backed into a corner and surrounded by hundreds of thousands of corpses, they all know that their final battle with the dead is about to begin.

Like I somehow do with most series, I’m not actually reading Autumn in order.  I read the first book and the second book and since I couldn’t find the third book when I went shopping the other day I decided to pick up book 4, Disintegration.

Unlike with the previous two books, I wasn’t really all that impressed with Disintegration.  Sure, it’s kind of cool to see how two completely different groups are managing to stay alive in such a horrific world, but the formula David Moody uses is getting kind of boring.  (SPOILERS)  Essentially a bunch of survivors mope around for a while, things get bad, they join another group and bring about its downfall.  Sure, he changes the names around a little but they’re basically all the same book at this point.  It’s kind of disappointing as someone who appreciates the overall plot arc of the series.

But as a novel on its own merit, Disintegration isn’t all that bad.  David Moody is still a master of suspense and he’s good at describing such a horrific world without ever going into descriptions of gore for gore’s sake.  Don’t get me wrong, though; this book is still pretty gory.  It’s just that it’s not gratuitous.  I like how he has his zombies develop abilities even as they deteriorate, which is somehow more terrifying because there’s the possibility they could even become fully human as they rot away to nothing.  If that’s not horrific I don’t know what is.

The characters were a solid ‘meh’ in this story.  None of them really stood out to me unless we’re talking about total jerks that get people killed, like Webb.  Yeah I know he’s a hothead kid but he’s the epitome of the Too Stupid to Live trope.  While not exactly being brilliant at it, David Moody still did a good job imagining how the group dynamics would be in such a diverse group of people.  People are constantly getting on each others’ nerves and pretty much no one agrees on what the solution to the zombie problem is.  Essentially, it’s a group of real people and is probably how most people would react in a zombie apocalypse.

So basically this one’s a solid ‘meh’.  I hope the fifth book is better.

I give this book 3/5 stars.

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Discussion: The Next Supernatural Creature Fad

I think we all remember the boring horror that was the vampire craze spawned by Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga.  (I still can’t get over the fact that her vampires sparkled.)  For several months you could not find a YA book that didn’t feature vampires in some way or another as every author and their dog tried to cash in on the vampire craze.

Thank goodness it’s died down to a somewhat reasonable level of late.  There have been quite a few trends since then, what with zombies, werewolves and shapeshifters.  I’m not saying trends are bad but they’re a little boring when that’s all you see on the shelves at your local bookstore.

As for the next trend, I honestly don’t have a prediction.  I think shapeshifters are relatively popular right now but there’s not as big of a market for the supernatural as there was even a year ago.  Right now it’s still all dystopia, all the time in the YA market.

Anyway, what do you guys think will be the next supernatural fad in YA?  Shapeshifting werewolves, sparkling zombies or something equally ridiculous?  I can hold out hope that authors will try to move away from European myths and draw creatures from African and Asian cultures, but that’s really quite a pipe dream.