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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.

Book Review: The Monster’s Corner

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Monsterscornerbook

Zombos Says: Very Good

Ghoulies, ghosties, beasties, here be monsters all, hobnobbing their way through the mortal realm in 19 tales assembled by Christopher Golden, with book-body parts supplied by Jonathan Maberry, David Liss, Kevin J. Anderson, Nate Kenyon, Sarah Pinborough, and many more. Squatting in the monster's corner is you, metaphorically speaking of course, as the next meal, the next victim, and next sideline viewer or partaker of nasty events. Identifying who the monsters and victims are can be a little challenging because sometimes they swap places or appear similar, depending on your vantage point, and the tone of monstrosity varies from story to story, as does the terror. 

Perhaps the clearest monstrous vision here is seen through Pinborough's The Screaming Room. Having snakes for hair and turning people to stone doesn't make the Gorgon a social butterfly, but when her dates do eventually show up, she does get to spend a very long time with them, enjoying their constant song of love. Only they aren't singing and she's deluding herself, turning her loneliness into happiness. A simple premise sustains a truly terrifying revelation, and this story will not easily leave you once you put the book aside.

Often the monster ranks are swelled by those we unleash ourselves, and in Maberry's Saint John, you may be hard pressed to find the saints, but sinners abound. Armageddon leads to madness, but sometimes madness can lead to redemption, and here the sinners must face a holy roller to reckon with, dressed in swirling white robes and long sharp blades wielding salvation.  Not surprisingly, coming from an author who specializes in death and destruction in apocalyptic measures, Maberry creates an unbalanced world populated with unbalanced people, and places his heroic protagonist, who's either deep-dish crazy, made so by the monstrous events of his past, or following God's crib-notes, within it, preaching one slash and thrust sermon at a time. There's an intimacy here as Maberry focuses on one small street corner and those people stepping into it, coming under Saint John's light. Victims and monsters are interchangeable. Salvation is tenuous. The emotional complexity deep and disturbing. Maberry may have created a new and noble antihero ripe for novelization.

For a swim with Lovecraftian primevalness, Tananarive Due brings us to Graceville, Florida in The Lake. Abbie's new job, new house, new life is growing on her so much she's becoming a whole new person; or thing, anyway. People say not to swim in the lake in summer, though the reasons are hushingly unclear. She swims anyway. The lake's calm water is so inviting. Slowly changes in her attitude start to match the physical changes between her toes, and the changes in her appetite. Is she dreaming? Is she delusional? Is she embracing a whole new Abbie? Her understated tranformation unfolds in carefully building paragraphs, rendering the terror mood gently and matter of factly, until the ending reminds you it's not wise to swim in the Graceville Lake during the summer months.

You won't find gore or check-the-door scares in The Monster's Corner, but you will find, hanging out in its dark recesses,  a well varied assortment of true monsters, seeming monsters, and would-be monsters, all either vying for your understanding–as carefully outlined in Gary A. Braunbeck's witty And Still You Wonder Why Our First Impulse Is To Kill You–or your blood.

Book Review: In Extremis by John Shirley

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InextremisZombos Says: Excellent

Reading John Shirley's In Extremis is like sticking your moistened middle finger into a live lamp socket: it's punishing but oddly exhilirating after the initial shock. These stories are nasty; they're rude, roiling attitudes of sludge scooped up into the palms of your hands, all greasy slippery feeling and gnarly intense, forcing you to look behind you fearing someone's going to catch you reading them. And you will. Read them. Losers abound, sick humanity thrives, and the scariest thing about Shirley's bowery dark environs is they're crazy batshit and familiar and you sitting there wishing they aught'nt, really shouldn't be. 

The acid test is getting past Just Like Suzie. The two stories before it, Cram and You Blundering Idiot may trip you up, but they're the warm up acts for the burlesque and grotesque reality show in  Just Like Suzie. Sure, getting caught in a train during an earthquake, and maybe hiring some guy to kill you but he's a shlub so he has to keep doing it to get it right are enough to dishearten you from continuing, but if you can keep going after Just Like Suzie, you've earned it. Seriously.

I can't describe the story too much, it's got that 1970s badassness to it, along with its gritty, adult comedy of errors, with those errors piling up into one big clusterfu–like I said; its all 70s badassness. Suzie's a prostitute who dies, I can tell you that, but her attachment to her junkie-john, a guy named Perrick, is fast and rock solid. In all the wrong place. Without any doubt you will squirm and sweat along with him, and find it well darn funny, too. Bad habits are hard to break and some break you hard, and some just leave you whimpering, dangling limp in resignation.

I can describe Faces in Walls for you a little more, though, and this one and Just Like Suzie are my favorite nightmares in this collection, but there are plenty more to go round. Imagine you're paralyzed, neck down, vegetating in Wemberly Sanitarium for years, bedded in a lifeless room with walls peeling their green paint, bed sores pressing angrily against you, and no one visiting you except for Sam Sack and those faces in the walls. Conversation with one of those faces in particular holds your interest, but Sam's attention you don't want. He wears a pillow case over his head and comes into your room late at night to play. His kind of play you don't need. But you can only lie there.  Until that one particular face tells you more.

There's a short story by Oliver Onions–can't quite put my finger on it I read it so long ago– that Shirley reminded me of with this one. And no it's not The Beckoning Fair One. It had a fairy tale quality to it as I recollect, a girl, and a curious friend. Shirley's less prosaic than Onions, of course, but darker in intent, and his rythm between narrative and dialog is more insolent and unforgiving, and with the psychological horror of each situation leeching the life out of his characters captured with such exhuberance, Shirley wins hand over fist. I wonder if Shirley looks over his shoulder while he writes, fearful someone might catch him in the act?

So pour yourself a glass of Shiraz, volume up The Three Tenors, and sit near a mirror so you can reassure yourself there's no one looking over your shoulder while you read. The wine and music will help sweeten the bitter spirit aftertaste when you've finished the book–if you get that far.

But not by much.

Book Review: Dog Blood

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DogBlood

Zombos Says: Very Good

This conflict wasn’t faction versus faction or army against army; it was individual versus individual, more than six billion armies of one. Beyond that, the Hate didn’t care who you were, where you were, or what you were. You were simply on one side or the other, your position in this new, twisted, f**ked-up world decided without your involvement by unknown variables and fate.

The beauty of David Moody’s Dog Blood is how you can read so much or so little into it. Pile on the metaphors of your choice and pontificate away, or ignore them and become mired in a broken world crumbling down around broken lives. This downward spiral of  hopelessness, of collapsing societies, of forlorn, shock-weary masses of people crushing in on themselves, and of mindless hatred leading to endless killing is depressing, frightening, and shamefully engrossing.  

Picking up the apocalyptic speed from Hater, his first book in this it’s-them-or-us trilogy, the Unchanged are struggling against shattered selves and the Haters, those aggression-infected individuals who hunt and kill anyone not like them; family members kill family members, strangers kill strangers, friends kill friends, grinding them into bloody pulp in the process. As in any good horror play, the Haters are more organized, more determined, and much more deadly than the Unchanged, who are herded into the cities and penned up by the military providing questionable protection while stripping away their humanity, and quelling any incursion of agression by mass obliteration of the infected area. Making a terrible situation worse are the Brutes, a new generation of Haters that are stronger, totally unreasoning, and never tire of killing. They’re like Saruman’s Uruk-hai in the Lord of the Rings.

Danny McCoyne, a Hater, has one goal: to find his five year old daughter, Ellis. He will stop at nothing to accomplish his goal because she is like him. We watch and follow him through his own voice, but this is no longer only about him. There are millions of others, on both sides, and Moody slices chapters between Danny’s search for his daughter and Danny’s Unchanged cousin, Mark–and his squalid existence–to open up the bigger situation all around both of them enough to slip it all neatly into a handbasket and kick it hard and fast down a steep slope leading straight to a hellish climax of destruction.

Mark is one of thousands of Unchanged, holding on with exasperation and desperation as food, water, shelter, and safety dwindle. Assigned a small hotel room by the military, he shares it with his pregnant wife, her overwhelmed-to-shutdown parents who can’t get out of bed, and someone else hiding in the locked bathroom. Mark tries to keep it all under control but failure is imminent when another person, a loudly complaining stranger, is dumped in the room with them, by the military, in spite of his protests.

As Mark deals with escalating frustration and worries over his unborn child, Danny fumes at being delayed from finding Ellis by an organized group of Haters who have a secret plan for killing every Unchanged man, woman, and child, and by the bipartisan-thinking Mallon, a man who forces Danny to control his hate enough to keep him from bashing heads in at every opportunity. Their combined effect on Danny make him question the ultimate purpose of everyone involved, including his own.

Moody piles up the rotting bodies in every nook and cranny without remorse or compassion because heroics and sanity play no part in this shattered world. His paragraphs are long but concise and filled with small details to describe much, like the ubiquitousness of the dead when Danny realizes he’s stepping on a corpse only by the crunching sound of its brittle fingers he’s grinding underfoot.

Even now I can hear those metaphors rustling furtively in your brain and similes kicking up gray dust. Just remember it’s only a novel, though it would be best if you read it on the beach during a bright summer day.

Book Review: Blood Oath

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Blood-oath-seal Zombos Says: Very Good

Nathaniel Cade is an 1860s vampire hoodwinked by President Andrew Johnson to serve and protect the President of the United States. His new partner, Zach is a modern day career-hungry politico hoodwinked into being Cade's human compatriot after a dalliance with the current president's daughter. Konrad is an evil Dr. Frankenstein type formerly of the Nazi SS who tries to hoodwink them both in Blood Oath, a race against time  supernatural spy novel assembling terrorist plots with nearly unstoppable zombie-steins to keep your blood running.

Cade's blood oath to protect the oval office, bound by Marie Laveau's Voudou in the 1800s–explained in a flashback to the events that prompted President Johnson to enlist Cade's services–keeps him from harming anyone except those who threaten the United States. He is incredibly strong, nearly indestructible, very self-assured, a natty dresser, and difficult to work with. 

In the opening salvo, a Special Ops mission in Kosovo pits him against a Serbian werewolf to retrieve a mysterious box. His constant battle with the Other Side's horrific threats is hinted at here, but as soon as the box is safely returned to the Smithsonian, where Cade has his digs, another terrorist plot begins.

Christopher Farnsworth keeps the story concise and the reading tuned to non-stop pitch as Cade and Zach get to know each other's foibles, strengths, and annoying habits in their search to find the truth behind a container shipment of badly decomposing body parts. Cade suspects his nemesis, Dr. Konrad Dippel, an alchemist who discovered the Elixir of Life and thus has lived for over 300 years, is behind the mystery. Konrad's penchant for assembling body parts into dead-men-walking automatons of destruction doesn't hurt, either, to implicate him. But another covert operation and shadow organization interferes with the investigation, providing more obstacles for Cade and Zach to overcome. These obstacles push each to their limits, revealing both men's vulnerabilities and their importance to each other.

The strength of bond that slowly grows between them, the stoic vampire who refuses to drink human blood and attends AA meetings (though he doesn't know why), and the flippantly selfish younger man, lends the story a deeper and continuing interest that will garner a following of loyal readers. Through little touches of their actions, dialog, and silences, Farnsworth softens Cade's and Zach's innate inhumanness into revelations for both of them; ones they didn't know they had buried away inside.