US Cover UK Cover
It begins with one body. A pair of medical examiners find themselves facing a dead man who won’t stay dead.It spreads quickly. In a Midwestern trailer park, an African American teenage girl and a Muslim immigrant battle newly-risen friends and family.
On a US aircraft carrier, living sailors hide from dead ones while a fanatic preaches the gospel of a new religion of death.
At a cable news station, a surviving anchor keeps broadcasting, not knowing if anyone is watching, while his undead colleagues try to devour him.
In DC, an autistic federal employee charts the outbreak, preserving data for a future that may never come.
Everywhere, people are targeted by both the living and the dead.
We think we know how this story ends. We. Are. Wrong.
As I understand it, George Romero planned to write this himself and had finished portions, and left plenty of notes, when he died a few years ago. Enter Kraus, an author who loves George's work and has written some zombie fiction himself.
Like most zombie works, this one takes place in a world where no one has ever heard of a 'zombie' except as a weird religious thing on one of those tiny little islands over that way somewhere. Early on a medical examiner calls them 'Miscarriages' but the term most people settle on is 'ghouls'. It takes them a while to settle into cranial damage as well, which is common, but frustrating for a reader who knows exactly what's going on.
The tone of this book reminds me of Stephen King circa The Stand, or maybe Under the Dome; every character has a lot of backstory, and we're given it, no matter how irrelevant it might be. This is a long, long book, people. You're not going to get through it in one session.
Although I didn't hate it, I did find some of it not very believable. I can get behind all the characters we followed early on ending up in Canada no matter how far away from it they were; that's why we followed them, after all. But every one of them coming up against the same zombie, with no one killing anyone else? And even allowing for that,
The timing is odd as well. The first half or so is spread over the days and weeks after the initial rising. Then there's a chapter that spans ten years, from the point of view of a character using non standard counting, so it's very difficult to figure out when anything is actually happening. Then the section after that is another five years later, and people keep referring to things that happened in the interim without telling us what those things were.
BE AWARE in case you need to, there's a short sequence about dogs that's quite upsetting.
It's not completely awful. It's an interesting addition to the ranks of zombie fiction.But, partly because of the length, I will probably not read it again.
No comments:
Post a Comment