Category: Horror
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.
Deadlocked by A. R. Wise
(Cover picture courtesy of Orisi’s Blah Blah Blah.)
David was caught in the middle of the city when the zombie outbreak started. His wife and daughters were at home, stranded on the roof as zombies waited below. He would have to fight through hordes of undead, merciless other survivors, and a series of death defying stunts to get home. However, even if he makes it there, how can he be sure they’re safe?
Deadlocked puts you into David’s head as he struggles to get home. Then a final confrontation occurs that will guarantee his family’s survival, but at what cost?
I picked up Deadlocked for free through the Amazon Kindle store (a wondrous place that I’m loving more and more since purchasing a Kindle for myself) and read through it in one sitting. It’s only 53 pages or so but A. R. Wise’s story sure does pack a punch. For being free I was pleasantly surprised that there were no blatant grammatical or spelling errors. In fact, it was a pretty good story overall.
David is the type of character that I love. He’s just your ordinary guy whose first instinct during a disaster is to get home and protect his family. Obviously he loves his wife and children and absolutely nothing is going to get between him and his beloved family. Not even a city full of zombies. I know this sounds pretty stereotypical but David is quite a dynamic, well-fleshed out character and it’s worth picking up Deadlocked for that alone.
The plot was very fast-paced being a novella but it also made sense. Wise covered a lot of ground within those 53 pages and I have a lot of respect for an author that can keep the pacing that fast and still tell a relatively coherent story. There were times the writing was a little choppy and confusing, but it was a fairly good read overall. The descriptions are very graphic so this is not for the faint of heart, but if you love zombies in general you’ll love this novella.
I give this novella 4/5 stars.
The End of the World Playlist by Dan O’Brien
(Cover picture courtesy of The Dan O’Brien Project.)
The world as we knew it had ended. Deep in the mountains of the west coast, six men survived. In the town of River’s Bend, these six friends continued on with their lives as zombies inherited the Earth. As they navigated the world that had been left behind, the soundtrack of life played on.
[Full disclosure: I received a free book copy from Dan O’Brien in exchange for an honest review as part of his blog tour.]
I’ll just say right off the bat that there is a lot of cursing in this short story. This is seriously recommended for mature audiences only. Let’s just say there are a lot of cluster f-bombs and generally mature content leave it at that, shall we?
Well, I don’t really know what to say besides that there is some really interesting and scarily believable psychological themes at play here. From the fact that the survivors have chained zombies into their stores and call them all variations of Bob (Bob the Blind Zombie, Bob the Sports Authority Zombie, Bob the Gun Store Zombie, etc.) to their general disregard for social taboos it’s clear that five years after the apocalypse the survivors aren’t doing so well. There was an especially disturbing scene involving a Ms. Pacman arcade game, but I’m not going to go into anymore detail in regards to that incident.
Dan O’Brien certainly intended for this to be disturbing and believe me it was. It really makes you wonder about those people that wish for a zombie apocalypse when the reality would actually suck. So thank goodness this is just a novella because it’s incredibly depressing and sadly realistic. I’m not going to say much more on that topic because then I’d be getting into spoiler territory. Sometimes it goes a little overboard with the whole Crapsack World trope, but that could be just a matter of personal taste.
I can’t use the world ‘enjoyable’ to describe such a depressing novella, but it was well-written and interesting. It’s not science fiction because Dan O’Brien never cares to go into detail about the apocalypse, but that’s not the point. The point is that zombies are essentially ruling the world while the last semi-insane vestiges of humanity survive. If you’re interested in psychology you’ll like The End of the World Playlist, but other than that it’s definitely a specialized sort of novella.
I give this novella 4/5 stars.
Sharc by Paul Rudd
(Cover picture courtesy of The BunsyDawg Diary.)
It’s massive, it’s intelligent, it’s relentless and it’s always looking for its next meal or its next challenge.
Maxwell Baxter is intent on fulfilling his greatest ambition yet, and he is an ambitious man. He wants to build the largest floating aquarium in the world, an aquarium city, and fill it with all manner of monsters from the depths, the first being a presumed extinct Megalodon he has captured, a prehistoric monster shark currently only thirty-five feet long but destined to grow up to one hundred feet of raw, razor-toothed ravenous greed with extraordinary abilities to detect anything edible or threatening in the water for miles around.
In the midst of international financial negotiations to raise the rest of the money to complete his ARC, and with the Governor of California being entertained on his private yacht on his way to review the facility, the Megalodon escapes and begins to terrorize everything in the Pacific, ships and other sea creatures alike, no matter what their size.
Maxwell Baxter’s future rests on a knife-edge, and the Megalodon has a gigantic mouthful of them, each five inches long and giving it the capability to bite a small whale in half with one snap of its jaws.
With a Megalodon about, if you are thinking of getting back into the water, don’t flatter yourself – you’ll barely be a snack.
[Full disclosure: I received a free paperback copy from Paul Rudd in exchange for an honest review.]
In some respects, Sharc reads a lot like a B list action movie, but at the same time Paul Rudd remains fully aware of this and occasionally pokes fun of himself in his writing. The comparisons to Jaws, the allusions to James Bond, etc. show that he didn’t take himself too seriously when writing Sharc, which is a good thing. It definitely helped me buy more into the premise and just enjoy the book for what it was rather than constantly nitpick over plausibility.
Sometimes the constant changing of points of view annoys me, but Paul Rudd managed to toe the line between head-hopping and moving the plot forward. The point of view changed often enough to make things interesting, but not so much that I couldn’t connect with the characters either. In fact, some of my favourite characters include the spoiled rich boy Tyler Baxter and the diver Morgan. Both have great character arcs and are just overall interesting characters. I wouldn’t go so far as to call them amazing, but the characters were good in that they were well-developed and changed throughout the story.
There are quite a few subplots throughout Sharc, but they don’t distract from the main plot: the fact that there’s a prehistoric shark on the loose. In fact, the subplots with the development of the ARC and the characters’ struggles just add to the tension the shark creates throughout the book. With the shark, it’s like waiting for a shoe to drop because you know it’s going to strike, but you don’t know where and when. You don’t even know if you can stop it. So I suppose Sharc could also be classified as horror, in that when you think about it, the idea of a great big shark swimming around devouring humans is pretty terrifying.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed Sharc by Paul Rudd. You just really have to take it for what it is: a plot-based thriller, not necessarily hard science fiction.
I give this book 4.5/5 stars.
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
(Cover picture courtesy of Reading with Tequila.)
Breathtakingly suspenseful and beautifully written, The Historian is the story of a young woman plunged into a labyrinth where the secrets of her family’s past connect to an inconceivable evil: the dark fifteenth-century reign of Vlad the Impaler and a time-defying pact that may have kept his awful work alive through the ages. The search for the truth becomes an adventure of monumental proportions, taking us from monasteries and dusty libraries to the capitals of Eastern Europe—in a feat of storytelling so rich, so hypnotic, so exciting that it has enthralled readers around the world.
With a premise centred around Dracula, a novel is generally a hit-and-miss. However, Elizabeth Kostova actually managed to pull it off and this was definitely a hit.
While the premise may attract many people, I have to say that the writing style isn’t for everyone. It’s very descriptive and you really can picture yourself in all of the places described, but some people might find it overly-descriptive. In historical fiction I don’t mind such things and the descriptive writing style really appealed to me because many of the settings in the novel are completely foreign to me. Elizabeth Kostova’s writing hooks you in and slowly builds up the suspense while you wait for the shoe to drop—which it eventually does, at an unexpected time.
This is a book you really, really have to pay attention to. I would definitely not recommend reading it when you’re tired because the plot is incredibly complicated in a blink-and-you-miss sort of way. There are a couple of intersecting stories from different eras, which can be confusing at times, but works surprisingly well in The Historian overall.
The characters are amazing. We don’t meet Dracula himself for very long, but he is definitely a memorable character, as are pretty much all of the characters we come across. Elizabeth Kostova has this way of making her characters come alive, even though all we learn about some of them is through the stories of the main characters. It’s sort of how we learn about Lestat and other characters in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and in this case, it’s highly effective.
I give this book 4/5 stars.