Tagged: post-apocalypse
Zomburbia by Adam J. 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.
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.
The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
(Cover picture courtesy of Redditor’s Choice.)
In The Chrysalids John Wyndham takes the reader into the anguished heart of a community where the chances of breeding true are less than 50 per cent and where deviations are rooted out and destroyed as offences and abominations. The narrator of The Chrysalids is David, who can communicate with a small group of other young people by means of ‘thought shapes’. This deviation from a cruelly rigid norm goes unnoticed at first. But sooner or later the secret is bound to be discovered, and the results are violent, horrific…and believable.
The Chrysalids is one of those few high school novel study favourites that actually doesn’t talk down to students. Heaven forbid they read an age appropriate novel that has practical messages about life in it! Well, the reading level is far below what I would consider high school, but it’s definitely a case of content making this a high school book. Incest (between half-cousins), sexuality, torture and death are some of the things students will encounter in The Chrysalids. By grade ten, which is when it is usually taught here in Saskatchewan, I would hope that fifteen and sixteen-year-olds are mature enough to handle such things.
The Chrysalids is a very short novel that covers a fairly large time period and there were times I was confused as to what the heck was going on. However, John Wyndham generally managed to keep the plot on track while developing his characters decently well. David won’t win any prizes for greatest male lead ever, but he’s not a bad character and you really do feel for him and his predicament in Waknuk as a telepath in a society that banishes ‘deviations’ to the Fringes.
My favourite part of The Chrysalids is how John Wyndham constructed the Waknuk society. It’s heavily implied that many centuries ago a nuclear war wiped out the ‘Old People’ (us) and the people of Waknuk are still dealing with the nuclear fallout. How do they deal with it? By turning to a warped version of Christianity and a book called Repentances written during the time of Tribulation (the nuclear war) that reflects the fear of the new radiation-induced deformities. While I won’t get too much into religion, let’s just say that the version of Christianity preached by the community leaders is not the version that I saw when I read the Bible and leave it at that.
The Chrysalids can be enjoyed on many different levels. Some could see it as a crusade against religious fundamentalism and the role of fear in keeping citizens obedient. It could be seen as social commentary on the hypocrisy of people’s fear of anything “Other”, especially when the New Zealand woman calls David’s people ‘primitive’ for not embracing telepathy. It can even been seen as a story of forbidden love between two half-cousins, if you’re so inclined. I’m not, but it can still be interpreted that way.
I give this book 4/5 stars.