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Books (Fiction)

Book Review: Apocalypse Cow

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Apocalypse_cowZombos Says: Udderly Good

Reading Michael Logan’s novel Apocalypse Cow, I was reminded of the New Zealand movie Black Sheep. Both works of fiction are darkly humored and both don’t reach the level of wit of a Shaun of the Dead or that deadpan delivered outrageousness of a Dead Alive, but Logan’s Scottish cows contrast well with his acutely offbeat characters that fall into neat categories of meat lovers, vegetarians, and government cover-up specialists.

Terry's the abattoir worker who can't get the meaty smell off him, no matter how much Old Spice he sloshes on. He survives the cow uprising that slaughters his co-workers. Young Geldof is seriously undernourished, bullied about by the nasty twins living next door, and is forced to wear only natural plant-based clothing by his mum Fanny, the devout vegetarian. Geldof's allergic to the clothing, and both mum and dad like to doff their clothing while at home, making Geldof's home life equally uncomfortable. Fanny is an activist in search of her next diatribe and crusade against the establishment this or that, and she is vexed daily by her meat-eating neighbor David, who ate his pet hamster when his parents died suddenly, leaving him locked in his room for three days and quite famished. Geldof's dad is a pothead. He only crusades for his next high. Crusading for her big journalistic break is Lesley, who is about to be fired from her uneventful job just when the bovine zombieness breaks out. 

It's the odious government villain, Brown, and his evil intention to wipe any trace of the virus that leaked out of a secret testing facility from the public's eye, that brings everyone together. And sends them on the the run from him, the infected cows, the infected rats, the infected squirrels, and then just about anything else with four legs, hooves, paws, and could be mistaken for being cute and cuddly. Logan delivers the contagion-spreading with restraint, making it hard to tell when he's being deadly serious or earnestly cheeky, but each character participates in the action enough to make each chapter a good build on the previous one as they make their escape to the Chunnel and hoped for safety in France.

While about every overly modulated wave of the modern zombie outbreak codec is chewed on and regurgitated more than a cow's cud by Logan's pen (or keyboard), he does twist up the bits here and there to curveball a surprise, overindulge on squirrels that want more than nuts, and maintain what could have been a one-note gimmick with a very short half-life into an engaging adventure with a little social finger-pointing to broil up the parody.

Dare I say it, his novel is udderly good.

Book Review: Death’s Apprentice

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Grimm_cityZombos Says: Good

Meshing diverse story elements from Grimm's Fairy Tales, the writing team of K. W. Jeter and Gareth Jefferson Jones create their own tale of three heroes taking on the Devil, who lives in his dark tower of an office building. Of course I don't need to tell you what business he's in, do I?

Hero Blake is cursed. He's stuck with a raincoat that's stuck to him like his skin, and would choke him lifeless if it wasn't for his determination of will. The curse came courtesy of the Devil and the chance encounter where Blake chose poorly, but still managed to keep his soul intact. Hero Hank is a giant of a man with the strength to match his size and a complete lack of fear that makes him fearless. He's brought into a deal with a gnarly dwarf lawyer who wants him to kill people who may be a threat to the lawyer's unnamed client, but since the lawyer doesn't know who is a threat, specifically, Blake manages to clean up the city's riff raff rather quickly,  taking out anyone he thinks may be that threat. Hero Nathaniel is Death's apprentice, and at only 17 years of age, he's sold into servitude by his father who traded a little more life– ten years worth–for his son's soul. Nathaniel's point of view makes this a young adult novel, but other points of view kick in as needed. Being a young adult can feel a lot like that–dealing with others' points of view–so it works well for the narrative.

Death likes Nathaniel, even though Death doesn't have the emotion to show it. And Nathaniel likes his job to some extent, even though the divine pins that keep his soul intact are weakening for some unknown reason that not even Death knows why. Which is surprising to both of them. When all three heroes are brought together, they learn their combined weaknesses are actually what makes them much stronger when united, and Nathaniel must choose between Death's direction to live his fate impartially or change it deliberately, but blindly.

And even here the authors have managed to include zombies.

I won't hold it against them. The walking dead work well within the story's context, although they stretch the fairy tale thematic fabric a bit thin with their presence. Then again, who else would you want to go against the Devil and his damned minions? The fisticuffs are directed with the usual ups and downs, tide turning this way and that sort of thing. The novel's style is also written concisely, without discernible highs or lows in sentence structure or cadence that will distract the reader.

While the Devil ponders the dessicated tree of life that suddenly bears fruit in the courtyard beside his tower, a forwarning of the ever popular prophecy angle that was foretold to him, and Death, who can see all the ends of life at all the ends of the world, but can't see Nathaniel's own end ponders why, Grimm City becomes another Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Sunnydale: a location situated in close proximity to Hell, or is a suburb of Hell, or may just be a metaphorical Hellish morass; it's hard to say, and because of that it does present a bit of a learning curve when reading the early pages. Jeter and Jones hit the ground running and the reader will need to keep pace by accepting the premise without question and the goals as they come; further explanation may be forthcoming in the subsequent titles in this series. There are certainly enough loose threads to tie up at the end of this one to warrant more explanation.

Which leads me to the question of contextual integument, you know, the "word stuff" between the larger paragraphs of actions and motives that supports a novel by providing all those little background things that flesh out the world the characters are characterized in, or in this case the city around them. Jeter and Jones are light on contextual integument when they should be heavy with it. I've recently read a few novels where I felt the author needed to trim down the pages; here I felt they needed to add pages. To be fair, many fairy tales are focused in this way, telling their stories with minimal overhead while delivering their moral meanings.

But, then again, they don't normally resort to zombies to beef up their storyline. 

Book Review: Last Days by Adam Nevill

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Last_days_novelZombos Says: Very Good

Adam Nevill never quite reaches the level of terror and suspense for his readers the way his characters are feeling it in Last Days, but readers do come close when the Presences come calling. 

Similar in subject matter to Peter Straub's A Dark Matter, there's a sinister cult called the Temple of the Last Days led by a charismatic, if mentally unbalanced, leader, a portal to a dangerous place opened that should never have been, and a man interviewing former cult members–the survivors–to find out what happened when its active members died by gunshot wounds, being gnawed to death, or by beheading one night some years ago. 

The person doing the inquiring is Kyle, a documentary filmmaker–he smokes Lucky Strikes and uses Canon cameras–hired by Max Solomon, a producer who wants to start a series of documentaries with a paranormal angle. At least that's what Max says. He leaves out a few important details, which we learn about later, along with Kyle. But Kyle is driven: he needs the money and also needs to prove to himself he's really as good as he thinks he is. Along with his cameraman Dan and his film editor, Finger Man, he's dead set on finding out why those cult members died, even if something that should be long dead and buried is set on finding him first.

The novel could be trimmed down from its 500 and some odd pages to tighten up the suspense and quicken the pace, but Nevill generates some scary moments when those nasty looking black stains Kyle begins to notice on the walls start to take on human shapes, and the smells of sewage and decay follow him as he visits the locations where the cult had headquartered. Accompanied by former members who left it before THAT night, he interviews them: there's Sister Isis at the Holland Park penthouse with her "small brittle body with a face that made Kyle think of a clown" and  Brother Gabriel, at the farm, who looked like "an Egyptian mummy wearing a Harpo Marx wig." Every one of them is scarred and scared of something they are reluctant to talk about but Kyle keeps digging.

After the interview in the penthouse during the day, Kyle and Dan return at night, after a few pints downed at a local pub, to collect their equipment. Odd sounds, a scampering presence, the sounds of doors slamming, and the smell of sewage scare them enough to question what they actually experienced. At the farm, more dark stains, nauseating odors, the sounds of unseen dogs barking, and Kyle left alone as the sunlight wanes ratchets up the terror, especially after he discovers what's living in a derelict bed.

You would expect the last location, the Blue Oak Mine where the murders took place, to increase this build-up of paranormal terrors, but Detective Sweeney's brooding, aloof, interview, even though it provides more disturbing and confounding news to Kyle, bogs down the momentum already built up. From this point on, Nevill illuminates the mystery more, but has lost his subtlety in involving our fears when doing so. Kyle experiences more and more strange nightmares, Max gets more and more involved, and those stains on the walls are getting nearer to Kyle. 

A secret meeting in Antwerp, to learn the history of the Blood Friends, depicted in a cursed triptych painted in 1556, is so richly captured in sordid detail, I wonder why Nevill chose to merely explain it through a static dialog exchange instead of bringing us back in time to experience it as it happened. The final showdown with these Presences and a revelation of the cult's ultimate purpose plays out much like the procedural difference between an A to B movie: tone, mood, and nuance are replaced by perilous action, blazing guns, and ill-planned-for contingencies that create discord for Max, Kyle, and Max's muscle for hire during their encounter with the damned; somewhat disappointing given the more artfully executed beginning. One gets the sense Nevill was reaching for his deadline instead of his limits.

But damn their luck, there are a lot of them to contend with, so a strong B movie ending it is.

Book Review: Portlandtown
A Tale of the Oregon Wyldes

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Zombos Says: Good

The gifted Wylde Family runs a bookstore in Portland, Oregon, a soggy place most of the time, both inside the bookstore (I’ll get to that) and outside the town. The mayor wants the rain festival to be very wet, which complicates matters as zombies invade the flooded town (I’ll get to that also). I won’t get to why the mayor and the town celebrates rain, but you’ll be able to figure that one out on your own.

Joseph Wylde is legally blind, but he still see’s more than most other people, and his wife Kate has the uncanny ninja ability to make herself unseen. Author Robert DeBorde doesn’t explain these abilities much, but they come in handy when Portland’s mayor comes calling with an odd matter or mystery for them to work on, knowing they are a unique pair of sleuths who can handle the unusual. They’re like a Wild West version of John Steed and Emma Peel in The Avengers television series, without their eccentricities.

While the mayor is preparing for the rain festival he asks the Wyldes to investigate the mysterious storm totem statue he’s acquired, hoping it will unleash a steady flow of droplets for the festivities and make him look like a demi-god as he calls forth the rain with it. He does, it does, and he ends up looking less a demi-god and more a horse’s behind, but the torrential result provides the rapid climax to Portlandtown: A Tale of the Oregon Wyldes. Unfortunately for the Wyldes, early experiments with the storm totem while in the bookstore prove successful.

Kick and Maddie, the Wylde kids, are Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew-ish spunky, and lend a hand as needed when not helping to run the bookstore. Their family business becomes very lively when the walking dead come to town. The zombies are courtesy of one formerly dead gunman who comes back to settle an old score and rack up a few new ones. He’s the Hanged Man, and aside from the spellbook he uses to come back to life, he also brandishes a handgun that doesn’t need to be reloaded and doesn’t miss its target. The gun’s handle is also colored red–some say it was stained red from the blood of its victims. Kick and Maddie wind up playing bobbing apples to the zombies dunking for them in the flooded streets of Portland, providing much of the energy of the novel’s showdown between the marshall who put him six feet under, and the Wylde family member who helped (and barely survived the ordeal).

The marshall is Jim Kleberg, Kate’s dad, and his memory of past events, and how he wound up keeping the deadly handgun, come to light slowly, through flashbacks and remembrances. As he remembers piecemeal, more graves are dug up, more dead rise, and various characters who aren’t overly fleshed out in this first entry in the series come into play.

The spellbook belongs to Andre in San Francisco, who, with his mysterious female assistant, fight supernatural monsters like the Hanged Man. Not lost on Andre is his culpability in creating such a monster, so guilt drives him as much as his duty. The sorceror’s cookbook appears to contain enough promising evil spells for future novels, so let’s see what DeBorde can cook up using it. How Andre and the Wyldes mesh is not fully explained here, leaving much room for backstory in a subsequent novel.

A rousing shootout at a traveling carnival sideshow when the Hanged Man reanimates, after reluctantly being sold to the proprietor as an attraction, perks up the middle of the story, and the Hanged Man’s unsavory ability to raise the dead as he passes near them creates a modicum of suspense. I’d expect townsfolk would be more alarmed and more confused when their relatives come back to bite them, but DeBorde keeps it low-key and never capitalizes on the gruesome or kinetic potentials of having so many feisty undead lumbering around.

Keeping his words between young adult in tone and historically informed but not preponderantly so, DeBorde doesn’t pile up events or action quickly, and his fairly straight trail of characters’ bad decisions (like digging up the Hanged Man in the first place) and wicked intentions (what the Hanged Man does directly and indirectly because he’s so darn bad), is easy enough to follow. His paragraphs and interludes can be bland at times, or quaint–take your pick, but DeBorde provides clean starting and ending points with some keystones left unturned in-between.

Writers with a hankering for continuing series tend to do that. The only advice (or hope) I’ll mention is that the second novel in the series, should it come to that, better switch from sarsaparilla to whiskey. Reanimating Readers will need something stronger to mosey down this trail again.

Book Review: R. L. Stine’s Red Rain

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Zombos Says: Good

It’s funny that author R.L. Stine’s first adult novel, Red Rain, still has two, single-mindedly evil, murdering kids at its center and dumbfounded adults on its periphery. Usually his Goosebumps scares come from good kids caught up in bad things and dumbfounded adults barely paying any notice, so not much has changed. Stine does add a short but memorable sexual encounter and describes the entrail spilling and throat ripping with clinical precision; however the pacing of his short chapters (2 to 7 pages mostly) and the slicing of the novel into 4 smaller parts, allows for too much breakage in the momentum once it actually gets going.

Lea, an amateur travel blogger visits Cape Le Chat Noir off the coast of South Caronlina, ahead of a potentially devastating hurricane. Her attitude is neither here nor there as to the danger (she’s from Long Island), which perfectly suits her amateur status, but part of the allure for her are the mysterious stories told about the Cape’s enfatuation with reviving the dead. Over a cup of tea she listens to how the dead were raised to help rebuild Le Chat Noir after the hurricane of 1935. Later she witnesses a Magic Hands ceremony and becomes spooked by her brush with the supernatural. Stine hustles through all this, eschewing suspense-building for expediently setting up context for the next chapter.

Of course, to be fair, another possible scenario is that Stine’s editor took a hatchet to his longer prose and removed Stine’s more carefully crafted work. For instance, compare Peter Straub’s 416 page Double Day edition of A Dark Matter with his unfettered and more artful longer version, The Skylark, from Subterranean Press. Whatever the case may be for Red Rain, the book as it stands reads more like a second or third draft, leaving us with intriguing inferences of otherworldly things instead of making us experience them more fully; and the gist of horror is in the experience of it.

Beginning with a promising hint of magic and death, Stine doesn’t provide enough backstory to spook us as much as Lea was. The chapters follow this same approach: a tippy toe’s worth of depth, then out of the pool and into another scene. There are very effective moments of terror, but there are also many lackluster moments in-between, especially when the adults talk. His adults don’t speak as well as the kids do, and when he reverts to the usual buddy cop banter, it never reaches beyond the locker room, towel snapping level.

Not surprisingly, his kids, both evil and victimized, are the strongest characters in Red Rain, with the evil blond-haired twins, Samuel and Daniel, taking the horror-edge lead. They appear out of the hurricane that Lea didn’t fear enough, walking through the carnage and death, appearing to her like blue-eyed angels. In a smartly daring move (or neglectful one, take your pick) , Stine pulls out a gruesome killing-ability-gimmick for Samuel, which balances the whole tone of the novel between 1980s exploitation-cool  and 1950s courageousness. The balance tips almost into absurdity when the evil twins plot to take over their new home and school, drawing blue arrows on themselves and those they convert over to their world-domination plans. It’s silly, it’s grotesque, and clearly a signature element of Stine’s stories, which he uses quite well.

Given more pages describing the eerie background for Le Chat Noir, more of the destructive hurricane of 1935, more of the bizarre Magic Hands Revivification Ceremony (which, if tourists like Lea can so easily attend it how much of a mystery can it be?), and more on the origin of the twins’ evil nature (here’s a hint: Wake Wood), this novel would be more of a nail-biter. Instead, Stine holds back much and explains only enough to provide his plot points movement to get us to the next short chapter. For Red Rain, the goosebumps do not come often enough, but when they do, Samuel and Daniel make the most of them.

Book Review: Dead Reckoning
Little More Dead Needed, I Reckon

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Zombos Says: Good

So what if they’re Vood00-type  zombies, Mercedes Lackey and Rosemary Edghill attempt to turn the Wild West a wee bit wilder in Dead Reckoning, a novel that moseys down the Nancy Drew-ish trail with its modicum of walking undead pitted against three characters in search of a franchise worthy of a young adult series: a cavalry scout raised by Indians; a young girl gunslinger in male disguise riding her horse Nightingale; and a scientifically-inebriated, emancipated woman riding her steam-powered wagon.

A promising, action-filled start leads to a lengthier, predominantly lukewarm middle, which leads up to an action-filled climax. The authors spend many words on chit-chat when more rough-riding and sidewinding is needed, especially when Jett, the black-clad, silver-studded, gunslinging and gambling southern sister who’s looking for her brother, ties one up with the snake oil and brimstone mastermind behind the zombie outbreak. The mastermind’s lacklustre explanation of how he creates them doesn’t move the story along much, and his leaden backstory intrudes into the suspense that’s having trouble building up through fits and starts. For a novel with a lot of zombies, two feisty woman, and one even-tempered man stepping carefully between them, you’d expect more sparks to fly. I recommend the authors watch a few Roy Rogers movies for pointers on sizing up their cowpoke action around the sagebrush humor and campfire lulls. I also recommend they add sagebrush humor. Having Honoria pout and shout and bluster about is not the same thing.

During a stop-over in Alsop, Texas, Jett can’t get her drink down fast enough at the local saloon before a bunch of zombies attack the town, wielding weapons! The encounter is mostly bloodless, although everyone in the town is killed. Jett’s horse manages to rescue her when she’s surrounded. White Fox, the scout, and Honoria Gibbons, the adventurous scientist who wears “rational dress,” make Jett’s acquaintance when Nightingale rides into their campsite, with Jett barely conscious. They go back to Alsop (although Jett rather gallop in the other direction) and find it deserted except for the town drunk, Finley Maxwell. Honoria sets up her portable laboratory in town while Jett and White Fox go investigating. They come across the Fellowship of the Devine Resurrection, led by one suspicious character named Brother Shepard.

The zombies are more meat-cleaver wielders than meat eaters. They’re brought to undead life for a nefarious and clever purpose. Not much of a mystery as to who’s doing the zombiefying, but the mystery as to why does provide some suspense in-between the zombie attack on the jailhouse and the town drunk’s sudden death and resurrection.

Jett’s agenda is mainly to find her brother and get out while the gettin’ is good. White Fox’s agenda is to follow the trail, as is Honoria’s, that leads to the answer of why small towns are going empty and the townsfolk gone missing. Clever touches are sparse but promising if this series kicks into second gear: Honoria uses her rich and eccentric father’s vast library like Google to research her troubling findings. Her telegraph skills come in handy as she sends her father the queries and he provides the lengthy answers. She also believes in the power of reason and science to help master any situation, and her rather dangerous steampunk-light vehicle, what she calls an auto tachy-pode,  hints at cleverer gadgets to come. There is also Jett’s penchant for male clothes and attitudes to provide enough hard-riding gumption while she searches for her brother, who disappeared after the Civil War. Jett’s southern leanings and anti-north sentiments can also stand some life-changing growth across a potential series.

Dead Reckoning has all the right ingredients for a tasty sarsaparilla soda, but the carbonation is a tad too flat for my adult taste. I’d reckon you’d have to be a Mennonite-type young adult to find it more than adequate, too. Less backstorying, stronger highs and softer lulls in the action, and a deeper look into what makes Jett, Honoria, and White Fox tick, need be provisioned before Lackey and Edghill saddle up for another adventure.

Book Review: 21st Century Dead, A Zombie Anthology

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21st Century Dead

Zombos Says: Good

It strikes me rather funny that the zombie zeitgeist, whether embodied as motif, foil, philosophical popsicle, commercial breadbasket, or cultural handkerchief, can be played either bloody raw or quietly contrite or humorously to deadpan highbrow. Zombies give you more bang for the grue-buck than any other bete noire in the fictional monster canon.

Editor Christopher Golden assembles an ensemble of despairing stories that play down the zombies and play up the troubled living coping (or not) with the undead's immediate threat or the longer term wreckage of the social order; not much gore or frenzied fighting and dying goes on within these pages, except for a few stories, because Golden is more concerned with the bummed out living's thoughts and feelings in an absurd world that makes daily life a make or break proposition.

Jonathan Maberry's Jack and Jillneatly measures action with emotional depth as his young people, Jack and Jill, are engulfed by the inner turmoil of Jack's cancer, the flooding from a torrential downpour, and their neighbors turning into chompers. It's one big slide atop a "black wave" and Maberry manages his words' rhythm in tandem with the situation's escalation of the distress and hysteria accompanying Jack and Jill's confusion, desperation, and ultimate surrender to the inevitable. Blood is spilled, guns are fired, and people die, but our attention is focused more on how Jack and Jill will survive than how they are going to die. Jack and Jill is one of the longer stories in this anthology yet it moves quickly and provides a familiar environment to become uncomfortable in.

Antiparallelogram by Amber Benson provides a less familiar landscape and a more cerebral storyline, although one that is still charged with emotional depth. Her obfuscatory style melds a future society, leveled into the have, the have-nots, and zombies to cope with, which is probably why designer drugs are used to palliate the social discrepancies and expected disruptions. Told in the first person, can we trust the narrator? Even the narrator's gender is not fully made clear, although a wife is mentioned; actually an undead person who is or isn't, but still familiar enough to burn memories. More vexing is Benson's anti-climax that leaves us with a beginning to the story instead of an ending, making Antiparallelogram feel like it was taken from the middle of a novel length idea, but here's the short story instead.

There is one humorous story, Reality Bites, from S. G. Browne. While the anthology is heaped to the brim with gloom and doom, Browne explores the advantages of reality television when zombies–non-carnivorous ones!–become the plentiful and amply moribund contestants in a host of shows. The downside is this reality doesn't bite enough: those befuddled zombies just rot and plop and pucker, making all those shows a repository for doldrums. Imagine how great it would be to have one zombie who, through stringent use of cologne and deodorant–and the occasional consumption of human flesh–remains looking like a living and breathing person. And he can even think, too! While Browne doesn't pull out all the social props to make his story as bitingly satirical as it could probably be, he does mine enough humor from the possibilities, making his story a welcome relief tucked in-between all the other 21st century dead's moroseness.

The Dead of Dromore stands out as the oddity and perhaps most experimental of the ensemble. Paragraphs trickle down the page in snips of words, in such a way I wondered if Ken Bruen was attempting some complex poetic structure or tonal haiku. One ex-marine with no scruples and four apprentices with even less scramble around "infecteds." Dromore may be overun, but the worst of it doesn't come from the infecteds. The pace is quick, the verbiage brief, and the tense motions between rescue and escape fail to achieve our involvement. Characters remain unchanged (except for that anticipated shift from living to undead inherent in zombie stories, of course), and events unfold in expected ways: you've read all this before, just not presented in this way.

More stories reside in 21st Century Dead: zombies with brain chips to control them for domestic service; families coping with zombie relatives; computer games wiring into human terminals; soldiers wired by parasitic mechanoids; and still more. Many of the stories seem unfinished, or perhaps a better way to put is they read like smaller parts taken from a larger whole, bringing us into the middle, or the end, or somewhere else within their stories, leaving you with a sweet tooth for more closure. Then again, with zombies, there is never any real closure, is there?

Book Review: Nocturnal by Scott Sigler

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GroomsWalk
Zombos Says: Very Good

Bryan Clauser and Pookie Chang, two San Franciso Homicide Detectives, step into it badly when a department conspiracy turns into a monstrous nigthmare for them and the rest of the city. The monstrous part comes from a cult of monsters. A big cult of them, living underground and coming out only at night. Their prey is the homeless, the vagrants, and the unnoticed. Keeping them at bay is the Saviour, an arrow-shooting, cloaked avenger with unusual abilities and weapons. When Bryan and Pookie muck up the Saviour's aim with their good intentions, the monsters, who have been around for a century or so and just itching to hunt freely and without fear, quickly grab the opportunity in this escalating horror thriller by Scott Sigler. Combining police procedural with mind-numbing genetics  gyrations to make it all plausible between the covers, Nocturnal's 500 plus pages accelerate faster and faster until the blow-out payoff grudge match.

Along the way there's character growth, some stunting, and enough lively banter between Bryan and Pookie to define their natures so much you care what happens to them. Pookie dreams of bringing his cop opus, Blue Balls, to television; Bryan can't quite get his hands around the concept, or his ex-girlfriend Robin, either, as she suddenly finds herself running the City Morgue and soon involved in a knee-deep police coverup. Pookie is overweight and wears suits a size too small. He also drives like he owns the road. Bryan's the one with the deadly aim, cool exterior, and odd history that churns up disquieting things from a dark sediment he'd rather have left alone.

If you've read Clive Barker's Cabal or saw that novel's movie version, Nightbreed, you will have a slight familiarity with Sigler's bizarre creatures. If you've seen Slither, there's one particularly unpleasant scene early in that movie you will vividly recall when you read about Mother and how she gives birth to all those nasty monstrosities with cute names. The monsters' underground home reminded me of the Goonies (ancient ships figure in both), but I'll leave it up to you to see if it does the same. 

I bounced between very good and excellent rating this novel; I felt a few less pages here and there would have moved the action faster for me, especially in Book 2: Monsters, the part of the story where everything starts going to hell more quickly than in Book 1: People. And that's only because I kept fighting the urge to skip past paragraphs as I became increasingly ansy to find out what would happen next. 

The writing style is more movie-ish than literary–cheeky dip dialog, straightforward, visually concise action descriptions, and people with just enough needs, foibles, and dirty nails to make them interesting in a nutshell–so the pages turn quickly as plotlines converge. Sigler's habit of sizing chapters to measure the pace even more may leave you as breathless as Bryan and Pookie when push comes to shove.

One important note for zombie and romantic blood-sucker aficionados: although these monsters enjoy chewing on humans, there are no zombies among them. Or romantic vampires. The only things Nocturnal's monsters love to do is hunt and kill.

Strangely enough, Bryan enjoys those activities, too.

A courtesy copy of Nocturnal was provided for this review.

Book Review: Zombie Island
A Shakespeare Undead Novel

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Zombie islandThe play's the thing, and in Lori Handeland's Zombie Island: A Shakespeare Undead Novel, that play would be The Tempest, wherein Prospero's  temperate isle becomes the fertile ground for raising zombies, or tibonage as they are known by necro-vampire William Shakespeare and his fair chasseur (zombie hunter) amour, Kate. This is the second book in Handeland's adventures of the vampiric Bard and his beloved Dark Lady of the sonnets, but stands alone well enough to keep you happily marooned, along with them, for its 250 and some odd pages.

The zombies are as balmy as the island's weather, so this is not a tome for hardcore gore fans. With the undead's constant "Brrr!" murmurings, they're the all- the-brains-you-can-eat phenotype of walking dead risen up from the shipwrecked and doomed crews Ariel's tempestuous storms swell onto the shore.

Ariel, the magical spirit Prospero freed from a tree, is bound to his bidding, although she hates killing so many innocent people for Prospero's mad dream of retaking his lost throne. Ariel's feminine gender here–in Shakespeare's play Ariel is a man–plays an important part: she's blue, fetchingly flies around naked, although invisibly, gives off impressive sparks when angry, and yearns for an emotion she doesn't understand. Calaban helps her with that, but he's all paws and razor claws which presents some tactile issues to surmount.

Emotional and tactile interlocutions abound as much as the zombies, providing the true bite and sustenance on Zombie Island. This is a love story: Prospero loves to have more zombies; the zombies love to have more brains (to eat); Shakespeare loves to hold Kate within his arms; and Kate loves for Shakespeare to hold her in his arms.

She also loves to kill zombies, and that's why she finds herself, at Ariel's scheming, on the island. Ariel creates the zombies, she wants Kate to kill the zombies. All works as well as could be given the circular reasoning of one magical sprite desperate to stifle Prospero's plans, but Shakespeare's unexpected arrival on the island, while at first beneficial, becomes problematic. Being a necro-vampire, he can easily raise the dead into zombies at the full moon. If Prospero finds this out it could thwart Ariel's plan.

Handeland intertwines Shakespeare's familiar words with his vampire counterpart's visions, emotions, and speech into breezy reading through the chapters. All players are directed with their needs, tempers, spleen, and desires foremost, and with romance while zombies go about their business. There is no strutting to fret about here; only a simple and enjoyable tale of love and zombies' labors gained and lost. Just add a banana daquiri or coqui, sip it while stretching idly on a tropical beach as you pause between Zombie Island's chapters, and read on. 

A courtesy copy was received for this review.

Book Review: The Return Man by V.M. Zito

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Return Man

Behind Marco was a closed metal door, a window in the middle. The flashlight's reflection in the glass burned like a sun in a starless universe. A small placard read DINING CAR in dirty red letters; next to it sat a large rectangular button. PRESS. The door had been hydraulic–hit the button, the door slid open. Wouldn't work now.

"There'll be a release somewhere for emergencies," Marco said, scanning the jambs. "Like power failures. Or when resurrected corpses eat all the people on board."

 

Henry Marco is a zombie bounty hunter. He lives in the Evacuated States, the western half of the United States not governed by the New Republicans, but by the dead, who he tracks down, one by one, for breathing and grieving relatives living in the Safe States lying east of the Mississippi River. It's not clear who is comforted more when he finds his target, the relatives or Marco, although he's driven to keep doing it. He does get paid for it, but money's the last thing he really needs right now.

What drives him is his wife, presumed dead and walking in all those familiar places those whispers of memories make the dead return to. Only Danielle's body refuses to show up where expected, so he refuses to leave his Spanish Revival abode until he finds her. For a head doctor he's one head case himself, full of false ambivalence and suppressed death wishes, but he manages to do his job well enough. 

And there lies the crux of the matter in V. M. Zito's The Return Man. Marco's reputation gets around to Homeland Security. Benjamin, his partner drumming up business from back east, is paid a visit by them and they strongarm Marco into using his gift for finding sentimental stiffs to find one in particular, a Dr. Ballard, whose importance to them, and just about every other government outside the United States, makes  the doctor's body a hot commodity: with the infection contained to the U.S., Ballard's body may hold the antidote, or at least an inoculation, against the disease. With the threat of Benjamin's brains being splattered unless he cooperates, Marco has no choice.

Like much of the zombie fiction today, the military is involved, biological terror instigants are involved, and crazed people with nefarious plans are involved. Unlike much of the literature, Zito brings a zest for zombie-pickings, close calls, and character motivations through dialog, thoughts, and actions: there's Marco, a ghost of his former self, reluctantly caught in the middle of a covert tug of war; there's Wu, the Chinese sleeper agent, a killing machine as effective as any zombie; the Horesemen, a militia made up of very determined anarchists chasing after Marco and Ballard; and Osborne, who directs Homeland Security with a hidden agenda and sends Marco on his unmerry way to find Ballard.

Last seen in California, in a maximum security prison that's now filled with a few thousand zombies, Marco's got his work cut out for him. He and Wu team up, but zombies aren't the only ones wanting to take a bite out of Marco's back as their travel to California involves a dangerously stalled locomotive and unnecessary side stops along the way that can kill more than time. Eventually you begin to wonder who will get Marco first: the zombies? Wu? the Horesemen? or Marco himself? He has a habit of knowing better but not following through on it.

Zito packs each chapter with enough zombies and the living mayhem to make the 414 pages summer-breeze by, although there are times the flailing limbs, chomping teeth, and tactical disadvantages and missteps blur into impracticality; but his style keeps the suspenseful momentum going forward, just as determinedly as Marco and the secret assassin at his side. And those ubiquitous zombies.

Book Review: Juggernaut

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Juggernaut

Zombos Says: Good (but lacks finesse and character depth)

A body sat in the driver's seat. A charred skeleton, fingers welded to wheel plastic. No hair. Empty sockets. Lips burnt away, giving the corpse a mirthless smile.

Huang turned his back on the carbonised corpse. He reclipped his belt. He clipped the holster strap around his thigh.

Behind him, the driver of the sedan began to move.

 

There is one thing that has always bothered me about stories of deadly viruses and the crazy people looking to exploit them for mass destruction: glass cylinders. Think about it. From Resident Evil's T-Virus to every other movie where a deadly contagion is stored in a glass cylinder just begging to be cracked, shattered, or suspensefully mishandled, does it really make sense? Who in their right mind would put an unstoppable, world-destroying biological agent in a GLASS cylinder? So they could look at it and gloat dramatically? I'm thinking only movie script writers do it for 'easy tension' because we can see it and we know the glass is fragile; or maybe an author would do it, one who's seen too many of those movies written by those script writers.

At least Adam Baker doesn't waste words over that easy tension as his glass cylinder changes hands and he doesn't let anyone gloat over it. In his novel, Juggernaut, the tension comes from Black Ops looking for the mega-weapon they, of course, can't control, contained in that glass cylinder,and from mercenaries looking for gold, but being played as dupes, and from the parasite controlled revenants (what Baker calls the infected) looking to bite fresh flesh off in chunks.

You would expect a lot of tension to be generated from the mixing of all these plot elements, but Baker lacks the finesse to hone his paragraphs into razor sharpness to build it up. His overuse of clippy paragraphs (around the three sentence length), and clippy sentences (terse, grammatically-trouncing descriptives strung together), lessens the action's impact more than it peps it up. Instead, Baker pepper and salts his knowledge of military and covert operation jargon heavily over everything. Cryptic communiques appear here and there mentioning SPEKTR and the ongoing aftermath of a clandestine operation. SAW, the squad automatic weapon, sends bullets flying in droves, thermite grenades explode, and black SUVs carry people through dark narrow streets into ambush. But remove his razzle-dazzle army intelligence and spy veneer and what's left is a non-commissioned read, good for summer because it's fast moving, easy on the eyes and light on the story's soul, but still 'basic training' , not hardcore zombie or thriller fiction.

It's also the prequel to his Outpost, but self-contained. Had Baker put in more effort with his characters beyond a token lesbian relationship, buddy-buddy soldier of fortune cutouts , evil doers and mad scientists doing evil in the usual ways, and a derivative parasitic organism taking over soldiers, messing them up with metallic-like spines throughout their bodies, this would have been an excellent actioner. More attention to his people would have grounded them beyond their stereotypical roles, and the dialogs you would expect them to speak, and the acting in ways you would expect them to act. Not entirely a bad thing, as Baker makes full use of their actions and our expectations of them (with one key exception). His people don't surprise us, or grow smarter, or wet their pants when the revenants show up. Where Baker excels is his use of 2005 Iraq locations and real-life psycopaths like Uday Hussein to anchor his characters and situations around.

It starts with roughed-up mercenaries Lucy and Amanda found on a locomotive in the dessert, and unfolds with how they got there. It's about missions going bad but still ongoing, a promise of gold as lure to the Valley of Tears, and the revelation that something deadly and hungry is waiting in the dessert. Baker's one exception to our expectations is Jabril, sprung from Abu Ghraib, tour guide for Lucy and her mercenary crew. His unsavory backstory is told by him at key times when a flashback instead of his exposition would have been more exciting to read. Baker uses a character's exposition of past events to explain important details and the present, but at times it unexpectedly switches into flashback, then back to exposition. An arguably  stylistic faux pas on Baker's part, but it doesn't disrupt the story's flow. The expositions are too well written, however, for spoken remembrances and serve only to tighten up loose ends.

Many of today's horror novels are written like movie adaptations before the movie comes out. That's not a bad thing in Juggernaut's case, but it keeps the novel from moving beyond a surface level of entertainment to find its depth in internal motivations and machinations like the ones older novels relied on to set themselves apart from the rest. 

A courtesy copy was provided for this review.

Book Review: Vacation

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Zombos Closet: Good 

There's a little of Soylent Green and C.H.U.D mixed in with the greens in Matthew Costello's Vacation, where zombies are replaced by humans gone cannibalistic bonkers as global warming and blight bring food shortages and dietery change. Costello's clippy writing style–lots of one-sentence paragraphs– is often too lean where it needs to thicken in detail and depth. The basic premise provides ample opportunity for action, but it's hard to shake the notion you're reading yet another zombie-that-is-not-zombie gimmick; and Costello doesn't exploit those opportunities to pile on the action or terror, which is surprising given the subject matter potential.

Can Heads are what the human-chompers are called. They're fast, smell bad, crazed, and nearly unstoppable in their one goal: dine out often. Jack Murphy's a cop in the 76th Precinct on Union Street in Brooklyn. Things aren't going well for cops: the can heads are eating their way through the boroughs, leaving the city a no-man's land of dwindling hot and cold running safe places to live. An attack on an apartment building late at night–can heads only come out at night–leaves him hurting. His captain recommends a vacation before Jack rethinks his job status, and Paterville Camp in the Adirondacks is the ideal destination.

Jack, his wife Christine, and their kids pack themselves, along with lots of fire power and C4, into his Ford Explorer and head upstate. The New York State Thruway is fenced off, manned by checkpoints, and relatively can head free. A brief pee-stop at the equivalent of a qwik-e-mart provides brief action. The rest of the trip is uneventful. I've had more action traveling the NYS Thruway myself, rest stops included.

Traveling through a few small towns to the camp provides even less action, although Costello's staccato paragraphing keeps you asking 'are we there yet?' in anticipation. When they reach Paterville Camp, which is filled with rustic cottages and surrounded by the mountains, they're greeted by Ed, the camp director, and Shana, his assistant. It's all smiles and handshakes and Jack fixating on Shana's girlish figure. Jack, being a cop, is also fixated on seeing if the place is all it's cracked up to be. Another family, the Blairs, introduce themselves, and while Christine and the kids hit the lake, Jack goes exploring.

The electrified fence, the hidden cameras, and the service road he's not allowed to use start him wondering what Paterville Camp is hiding. All that firepower he brought along comes in handy, providing the most action-packed camp activity in the novel. When the camp's secret is finally revealed you won't be surprised, but Costello supplies enough action to keep you from being disappointed.  

Vacation is a snack not a ful meal, but it will tide you over until the next zombie gimmick is served up.