Axiom's Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy

The first book in a Zombie Trilogy written by Rhiannon Frater

Reviewed by Sam Christopher

Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars

Let me say for the record here that I’m not a fan of running zombies. I’m not saying there can’t be any interesting story that employs them, just that I see no way for anyone to ever get away if there are sprinting creatures who never get tired chasing them. Even if the protagonists are in a car, it always seemed to me that at least one zombie would see them and give chase, and even when they lost him another would almost inevitably pick up the trail, and so on and so forth until they ran out of gas. And on foot… forget it. How do you outrun something that never slows down? Hell, in most horror films people can’t even outrun the knife-wielding maniac who isn’t running, even when the prey is in a car!

Funny thing in this book is that none of the characters in it are fans of the “running dead” either. There are constant references to Romero’s work by characters here, with it being mentioned several times that the zombies of this novel aren’t “following the rules”. Two characters in particular, Jenni, who’s seen every zombie movie with her abusive husband—who was even so probably a real sweetheart before as compared to the last time she sees him here—and Juan, a guy described as having a “zombie handbook”, are driven almost to distraction by what they perceive as breaches in conduct on the part of the reanimated dead. And while I can see someone saying that’s not a very realistic reaction to the situation, my only defense of it would be that people in fantastic situations often come up with fantastic methods of coping. The author’s note at the beginning of the novel reminds us that this is a story of a zombie apocalypse set in Texas, and that she’d always been told to write about what you know and love. “Well,” she says, “I know Texans and I love the zombie genre.” I can’t argue with that.

The story begins with Jenni hiding out on her front porch from her hungry family. Just as she’s about to give up hope—they have found her and are working hard to get to her—Katie pulls up in a pickup truck. Katie, we’ll soon learn, is a district attorney who inherited the truck from a man murdered while trying to help her, and this after Katie had been attacked by the love of her life, Lydia. The two women go on the run, trying to get away from population centers while also dealing with the situation they find themselves in. Along the way they meet up with an older couple who live in the back of their hunting store (which is a very good profession to be in if zombies attack, I would think) before eventually rescuing one of Jenni’s other children, Jason, who had been camping when all the stuff started, and finding a town of survivors who have built walls to keep out the dead.

As with all the best sf tales, this one is all about how this situation affects the people involved, with Frater doing a masterful job of making us care about these very real characters. She tells us it began as a short story on the web that she came to realize could be expanded into a much longer tale. We can only be happy she made the effort.

See also Sam Christopher’s review of Brian Keene’s Zombie novel The Rising

Buy all three books in the As the World Dies trilogy from Amazon.com:

Brian Keene’s The Rising gives us a different kind of Zombie novel

By Sam Christopher

Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars

I don’t know anything about Brian Keene—although I guess I should since the cover of this book trumpets him as a “Winner of the Bram Stoker Award”, which I learned after reading it was for this novel (he’s won another one, too)—but after reading this I can say that he is one hell of a writer. I really thought going in that this was just going to be another zombie story, and while I do enjoy a zombie story about as well as anything else I’ll be the first to admit they can be monotonous, even the very good ones. I mean, really, how much can you do with dead people walking around eating live people? I know, I know, the best of these stories isn’t about the blood or the zombies, the best horror stories, indeed the best sf stories period, are those that focus more on how the situation affects all the “normal” people than just cataloguing atrocities or wonders. Somehow, though, Keene took a very simple idea and changed it completely around, adding several layers of complexity to the central idea of most zombie tales by adding two elements most authors and filmmakers who explore the genre skirt but mostly eschew.

When The Film That’s Very Good but I Wish They Would Call It Something Else—otherwise known as the Dawn of the Dead remake—was being written there was an idea floated around that other animals besides man would be shown to be coming back from the dead. There was specifically a scene involving “zombie dogs” that would be shown to only attack living dogs that I read was originally supposed to be in the script—remember how surprised everyone was that Chips had survived in the underground garage with the zombies that were there?—but it was evidently taken out at some point. In this book, not only does virtually every animal come back, every animal attacks living people. This leads to some harrowing situations for our would-be survivors but also stretches credibility to the breaking point on occasion. It is a very interesting idea, and I really did like it for the most part, but there were several places where it seemed that if all animals really were coming back and had the cunning these “Risen” all seemed to have there would just be no way anyone could really get away from them. It was kind of like the situation with sprinting zombies in other places; it was always hard for me to believe that anyone could really get away from them for any length of time. But that’s really a minor gripe here because of how well the idea is handled.

Which brings us to the other thing that’s so very different about this story than others of this genre: Here, the dead—whether man or beast—are unremittingly, irredeemably evil. They are smart and cunning, reminding one of the Black Lanterns in DC’s Blackest Night event (it wouldn’t be a surprise to me, in fact, if Geoff Johns hadn’t patterned some of the event after the situations here in this book). They are other entities that use the bodies of the dead—again, in much the same way DC’s Black Lanterns do—for their own evil ends, in this case to escape a place of torment. Fact is, Keene basically says they are demons escaping from Hell without actually saying it. This is a pretty Christian zombie novel in many ways and I found that kind of refreshing, probably because it’s not something most story-tellers seem to want to bring into their visions of this particular apocalypse.

I know I haven’t really said much about the specific situations or characters. Just take my word: If you read this you’ll thank me for not spoiling anything. I especially loved the ending. I know there’s at least one sequel to this book and I look forward to reading it. I just need to get through several hundred other things first.

See also Sam Christopher’s review of Rhiannon Frater’s Zombie novel As the World Dies: The First Days

Buy The Rising and Other Zombie Books from Amazon.com:

(Part of our ongoing series covering all things Star Trek)

A Star Trek novel (2nd in the Crucible trilogy) by David R. George III

Reviewed by Sam Christopher

Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars

This is the second in the Crucible trilogy, centering on Spock (as you may have guessed by the title). The first, McCoy’s story, was an absolute tour de force, easily the best ST novel—indeed, the single best ST story—I’ve ever read. It was also, of course, the longest ST novel I’ve ever read, filled with rich detail spanning the life—both lives—of Dr. Leonard Horatio McCoy. As that was also the first story by Mr. George I’d ever read I naturally had high hopes for the rest of the series and dove into the Spock tale head first immediately upon finishing the first novel. While not quite as satisfying—and just a little over half as long—as the previous installment, Crucible: Spock is still an excellent read with an interesting take on the character.

One of the things that always puzzled Trekkies (mainly because we’re all geeky enough to wonder about such easily explainable things) was the mostly stoic Mr. Spock’s seeming gushes of emotion in the original pilot episode The Cage. There we see Spock smiling broadly at one point and also raising his voice in obvious consternation on the teleporter pad when the two female officers are beamed down without the rest of the landing party and otherwise behaving pretty much as a human with pointed ears more than as an emotion-controlling Vulcan. While the real world explanation is simple—Roddenberry just hadn’t completed his character sketch of Spock at that time, I’m guessing—in this novel George provides a very plausible explanation for the world of Trek: that Spock, having been assigned to a ship full of humans, had made the decision to approximate what he thought the humans would expect his reactions to be in order to make his shipmates more comfortable. A logical decision, logically arrived at. That changed here when Kirk took over as captain. After the events of “Where No Man has Gone Before”, the second pilot, in which Spock still acted somewhat human, Kirk spoke to his First Officer and told the Vulcan that he never had to pretend to be something he wasn’t under Kirk’s command. Thus was born the demeanor we all recognize.

Of course there’s much more to this story. Spock’s obvious regret over what he perceives as his own failures as a friend to Kirk, even while performing his obvious and proper duties as First Officer, during the events of “The City on the Edge of Forever” will lead him to eventually attempt to undergo the Kolinahr, the purging of all emotion, for a second time (he had first attempted this just prior to the events of Star Trek: The Motion Picture). Along the way, we are treated to Spock’s life after the “death” of his friend James T. Kirk, along with accounts of various time travelling missions—most notably the best story from The Animated Series “Yesteryear”, in which Spock goes into his own past to save himself as a child—as the tale twists and turns, delivering us to a very good, and dare I say, logical conclusion.

As I have said, these books are excellent reads, interesting stories that are very well-paced and well-written. I would say, though, that the best thing about these first two is their exploration and expansion of the friendship between Spock and Dr. McCoy. Even in the films, where McCoy essentially carries Mr. Spock’s soul for a time before risking his own health and, perhaps, life in order to return that soul to Spock’s reconstituted body we are never shown the true depth of their affinity for each other. Stories involving these characters almost always center on their shared friendship with Captain Kirk. But here, in this first two-thirds of this trilogy, author George gives us something new, something fresh, a new way of looking at these characters we Trekkies have lived with and loved for so long. I think I’m going to take a little break from this series now. The last volume deals with Kirk and, while I’m sure this author has something fresh to say about the captain, I think I’ll just bask for a little bit in the sunshine he has already brought to these two beloved characters.

See also Sam Christopher’s review of Crucible McCoy

Buy the Crucible trilogy from Amazon.com

(Part of our ongoing series covering all things Star Trek)

A Star Trek novel (1st in the Crucible trilogy) by David R. George III

Reviewed by Sam Christopher

Rating: 5 out of Stars (Highest Rating)

In one sentence: Simply the best Star Trek novel I’ve ever read.

This series was evidently the brain-child of editor Marco Palmeiri, who mentioned to author George that the latter should think about writing a TOS novel. Later, Palmeiri brought it up again, saying it should be a TOS trilogy and that it should be published in conjunction with the 40th Anniversary of the series a few years ago. The author then says he cast about for an idea before finally hitting on what he thought was the perfect “in”: he would examine each of the three main characters of TOS—Kirk, Spock, and McCoy—through the lens of a single event that defined them all, in this case that event being the effect on each character of the life and death of Edith Keeler from the episode “The City on the Edge of Forever”. He would begin with McCoy’s story, then move to Spock, ending with Kirk’s. He also made the decision to utilize only what was shown or intimated on the screen, either in tv or film, and build his narrative around that. This led to the fun idea of even using the Animated Series.

McCoy’s story is necessarily the longest of the three, not least because it essentially chronicles two separate lives. There is the obvious 23rd-24th Century life we’ve seen from TOS to TNG, but there was also a lifetime spent in the past, beginning in 1930, which began with his deconstruction of the Federation’s past with the selfless act of saving Edith Keeler from the automobile accident that was supposed to end her life in ’30. This latter timeline shows McCoy work in New York for a couple of years while waiting for his friends to rescue him before heading to Atlanta. He ends up in Hayden, South Carolina, taking up residence and making a life as best he can. He is at first reluctant to do too much or get close to anyone for fear of altering history but he eventually comes to realize—to his abject horror—that that ship has sailed; he even comes to realize the full magnitude of what he has done and resolves to live out his life, a decision that leads him to a self-revelation that saves him from loneliness in the past while also informing his “future” self and saving “that” McCoy as well. In between the “on-screen” stuff, we’re shown the 23rd Century’s McCoy going through his obvious intimacy issues as well as his scientific work in trying to determine the effects of time travel on people and objects. Both are very compelling and well-written stories.

As previously stated, this is the best Trek novel I’ve ever read. It is also the longest single Trek novel I’ve ever seen, my paperback being over 600 pages of pretty small print. It is a touching story—two stories, actually—that really says all there is to say about the character of Dr. Leonard H. McCoy. I can’t say enough about how great this book is. If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favor and drop everything else and read it now. You’ll thank me.

See also Sam Christopher’s review of Crucible McCoy

Buy the Crucible trilogy from Amazon.com

(Part of our ongoing series covering all things Star Trek)

An autobiograhpy of director/screenwriter Nicholas Meyer (Star Trek II: Wrath of Kahn, et al)

Reviewed by Sam Christopher

Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars

As autobiographies go this book is not bad. It tells the story of the author from his beginnings in New York and follows his early, formative years—relating, for instance, his reaction to his mother’s early death of ovarian cancer—as the son of a successful psychiatrist (father) and a concert pianist (mother), born on a Christmas Eve. Meyer tells us he would today be diagnosed as having ADD; as a child he would happily absorb and gain all manner of knowledge of anything that interested him—music, movies, Sherlock Holmes stories, dinosaurs, etc.—but anything else, most especially anything having to do with math, would just pass right through his head without leaving any impression at all. He even had to repeat the fourth grade. Later, he went to the University of Iowa and wrote a column for the school paper of movie reviews that would help to land him a job with Paramount putting together and deciphering for the general public press kits for various films. He later would write the novel and screenplay for The Seven Percent Solution, in which Sigmund Freud and Sherlock Holmes meet, before going on to write the screenplay (from an unpublished novel by Karl Alexander) for and direct the film Time After Time, an excellent sf film about HG Wells pursuing Jack the Ripper in modern-day San Francisco through the use of a Time Machine. All of this before Meyer’s first foray into Trek, where he saved the franchise with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

One of the things that surprised me in this book is that Meyer was not a fan of Trek at all until he came to the franchise in ’81. He says he had seen an ep or two while at the University of Iowa but that it didn’t make much of an impression on him at the time. Even when called in to talk with Harve Bennett about the sequel to The Motion(less) Picture he failed to get excited. Until the two men watched Space Seed together; that got the writer/directors attention. Then he figured out the hook he needed for the characters and offered to make the film for less than a quarter of what the first cost three years earlier and the rest, as they say, is history. He would also have some kind of hand, however peripherally, in all the other films up to ST VI: The Undiscovered Country (except for ST V: The Final Frontier) when he came back to make the last film starring the original cast. In both cases—ST II and VI—Meyer made the pictures for less than the previous installment (allowing for inflation in the case of VI) and made what most fans would consider to be better films than the preceding chapter.

In fact, the only thing that keeps this book from being rated higher is that it pails for me in comparison with Shatner’s Movie Memories on the ST film level and with Doohan’s Beam Me Up, Scotty on the biographical level. This is, I know, purely personal and I would certainly recommend this book to anyone interested in either Trek or Meyer himself. It is well-written, which makes sense as Meyer was a writer before being a director, and informative but just not on a par with the above works, which it reminds me of while being inferior to for me. It did make me want to read The Seven Percent Solution, or at least watch the movie, neither of which I’ve ever done.

Buy The View from the Bridge at Amazon.com

A Zombie novel by Timothy W. Long

Reviewed by Sam Christopher

Rating: 2 ½ out of 5 Stars

This is another Library of the Living Dead novel, a library that as of this edition now boasts seven books, all published, I believe, this year. This is Timothy W. Long’s first novel, although he has apparently published various forms of sf short stories in other places. This novel is set in Seattle, which is where Mr. Long lives. Apparently, Dr. Pus asked him to write a novel for this line and this is a creditable effort. (And I mention the line mainly because there is an ad in the back saying they’re looking for zombie authors so any budding authors reading this who are interested should contact Doc at www.libraryofthelivingdead.com as one never knows til one tries.)

Our story starts with the beginning of the “zombie plague”, which in this story is a would-be cancer cure gone awry. We then begin following a series of characters as they have their own travails with the zombie hordes. First, there’s Mike, a newspaper man still living with the memory of his child’s death in an accident and his ex-wife’s blaming herself for the boy’s death and hiding from life in a liquor bottle. He and his friend Erin have only elliptical skirmishes with the undead at first while trying to do the reporter thing and figure out what’s going on as the government closes off a section of the city with troops as it tries to keep a lid on what’s really going on. Then there’s Lester, a drug dealer living in the closed-off section of the city who ignores the warnings to evacuate. He prefers to spend the time with his girlfriend getting high and having sex while attempting to ride out whatever’s going on. He, of course, will learn there’s more going on than the authorities are telling. Next, we have Kate, who’s… different. She’s a sexually deviant serial killer with martial training in the use of swords; in other words, not the kind of chick one normally finds walking around out there. She and her friend Bob, who knows nothing about her “secret life” and calls her “kitty cat”, are eventually swept out into the streets as the story builds. Alice is a normal, everyday housewife. Well, a normal, everyday housewife who arrives home from work to find that her estranged teen son has turned her husband into a flesh-eating monster who chases her through the house and out into the yard. And, finally, there’s Grinder, the lead singer for a punk band who becomes fascinated with the undead after watching an outbreak at one of his concerts. He’s fascinated, but not so much that he wants to join the “new aesthetic”. Each of these people and sets of people are followed individually as the story heads for a sequel-friendly conclusion.

Now, this is a well-written book. The characters are pretty well fleshed out and realistic, even the serial killer only comes off as a little outlandish here, reminding me more of the DC character Katana than anything. I have only two real problems with this book. The first is the author’s device of labeling everything as Day Zero and then Day One. He intersperses the running stories of each of the characters very well, keeping the reader’s interest in each of them from waning, but it just seemed to me that, especially with Lester and his girlfriend, everything that happened could not have happened in one day. For Mike and the rest—with the possible exception of Grinder—I could see everything they did taking place in one day and night, but Day Zero for Lester looked like it would have taken at least three days to get through. The other thing that bugged me was the end, or, rather, something that happened near the end. I know this is a zombie novel and there’s death all around but there was a death near the end that just seemed gratuitous to me—and, yes, I know how that sounds. It just didn’t fit for me, that’s all, and really hurt the story in my eyes. Those two things, especially that last, brought this down from a three star book to the above rating.

Buy Among the Living and other Zombie  Books from Amazon.com:

The first book in the series following the adventures of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers

By Sam Christopher

Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars

As I think I’ve made clear in the past I’m pretty avid when it comes to sf in general and Star Trek in particular. But, even so, I don’t see everything and it sometimes amazes me the things I miss. Like Star Trek S.C.E. Following the adventures of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers, this started as a series of e-books, an idea by editor John Ordover and author Keith R.A. DeCandido. It has the 24th Century Montgomery Scott in a role he could never have imagined for himself in the 23rd Century: a desk-bound administrator. Scotty is the liaison between the S.C.E. and Starfleet Admiralty, navigating the political waters he had so long eschewed in his earlier life and commanding a crack staff of engineers who can “build, rebuild, program, reprogram, assemble, reassemble, or just figure out everything from alien replicators to doomsday machines”. This first book follows the crew of one of the ships, the USS da Vinci, and we are eased into the new series and cast with the addition of the familiar Geordie La Forge from the Enterprise, TAD to the da Vinci as they explore a mysterious ship the Enterprise has fought.

The da Vinci is commanded by Captain David Gold, a friend of TNG’s Picard. Gold is married to a Rabbi with a congregation on Earth and has many children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, a sharp contrast from most ship’s commanders we’ve seen in Trek before. It has always been characterized as a lonely job that puts distance between the man with all the responsibility and the people he most associates with. Gold seems to have an easier manner than most captains we’ve seen, commanding respect while giving his people a free hand to do their jobs. His First Officer is someone we’ve seen before, engineer Sonya Gomez, who has risen from her subordinate role to La Forge and now actually outranks him. She is seen to have risen from being a rather clumsy (more on that later) junior engineer to being a confident, and inventive senior engineer operating in the great meritocracy of Starfleet. Then we have Security Chief Domenici “Core-Breach” Corsi, who can be very prickly and humorless when it comes to doing her job. Other characters of interest are Bartholomew Faulwell, the da Vinci’s language specialist and cryptographer who also may be the first gay Trek regular cast member, and 110, nicknamed “Soloman” by Capt. Gold after his mate 111 was killed on a mission and he refused to follow Bynar tradition and return to the homeworld of Bynaus for re-pairing.

The four stories in this first volume are inventive to a point but borrow from both previous Trek—which is always expected—and sf in general for situations. The first story, “The Belly of the Beast”, concerns the S.C.E. boarding a huge spacecraft, large enough to hold tens of thousands of humanoids, made inert through battle with the Enterprise-E. What they find is reminiscent of both the TOS episode “Operation: Annihilate” and Marvel Comics’ alien race The Brood (which is itself a riff on the creatures of Alien). A very good, atmospheric story by Dean Wesley Smith. The second, “Fatal Error”, was written by Keith R.A. DeCandido and is also an interesting story with twists and turns as the engineers try and repair a computer which pretty much runs everything for the planet Eerlik. I read somewhere that this was an attempt to reverse the trend of so many TOS episodes where the crew would show up and free a society from the tyranny of a supercomputer, but I always thought that was already accomplished in “The Paradise Syndrome” and “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky”.

Then there’s “Hard Crash” by Christie Golden, a touching story about the engineers attempting to stop what is essentially a sentient vessel from destroying a world as it lashes out in grief. This is my favorite of these stories. And the final tale—actually half a tale in this case, with the other half continued in the second book—is “Interphase”, by Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore, which concerns the da Vinci being sent to Tholian space to retrieve a certain Constitution-class ship which has rematerialized there after going missing for the past 80 years or so. This story was obviously written before the Enterprise episode “In a Mirror, Darkly” and posits a reason for the Tholians to be reluctant to allow the Federation to salvage the ship. This was also a very good story and I look forward to finishing it when I get the chance.

These are all well-told stories and interesting continuations and embellishments of the Trek we all know and love. My only complaints would be with the constant reintros of the characters. But even these wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t say the same things so often. If I had read one more time about Gomez and “The Hot Chocolate Incident” (from TNG’s “Q Who?”) I might have ripped the book in half and thrown it across the room. Even when it wasn’t stated flat-out, it was alluded to, usually by someone who had known her for years and probably could have thought of many other anecdotes that would more typify her as a person and officer. Other recurring mentions were “Soloman’s” mate dying and Faulwell’s long distance love, Anthony Mark, which are mentioned so much that these characters almost seem static, unchanging, at times. All these are, I’m sure, a function of this series being new and different authors putting their own unique mark on their section of the mythos. As this series is now up into its eighties as far as books go, I’m sure these things have long since past out of it.

So there you have it. If you haven’t read these, as I haven’t til now, you now have a new branch of Trek fiction to mine, and if you have… well, this probably didn’t make any difference to you.

A Book from The Library of the Living Dead written by Rob Fox

By Sam Chrisopher

Rating: 3 ½ out of 5 Stars

I don’t know that much about The Library of the Living Dead Podcast run by someone named “Dr. Pus” (maybe he could have helped me with my MRSA) but they have now apparently began publishing books and I have a couple of them. This one, the good doctor tells us, he found as a running journal on the Web and was so impressed with its content that he contacted author Rob Fox and requested it be added to the podcast. Then, when Dr. Pus (and we should always use the title here, folks, as these people worked hard for these titles [now imagine my mortification if I find out that this guy really is a doctor]) decided to begin publishing zombie novels, he says Fox and this story was the first thing he thought of and that Fox rewrote the entire thing for publication and here it is.

This is the story of a man whose name I don’t think we ever learn, a man who has decided to do his best to chronicle everything he can on his journey through hordes of flesh eating undead to find his fiancée, Darcy. All the way through he realizes it’s a hope against hope but he also thinks that he has to keep whatever hope there is left in his world alive. It all began with the attack on a young boy named Shawn Crockett in South America, who died in the hospital and arose to attack his physicians. From there the whole thing escalated and quickly reached the US. The book starts with our hero at work, hiding out from zombified supervisors (boy, I can relate to that) and co-workers, and just the occasional undead menace that happens to wander in. He has many, many adventures, first finding a man who leads his undead wife around on a leash because he can’t bear to destroy her then later finding the man’s children in a safe house with others. He, of course, loses most of the people he ever meets—attrition in a world of the walking dead is high—but manages to hold onto a few for most of his relentless search for his love.

The writing of this book, as with most small press offerings, could have possibly stood a little more editing attention. There are common misspellings throughout and what would normally be considered typos. In the case of this book, however, I say “possibly” above because this may have been intentional. The narrator is not an author, just a regular guy, and the errors, as I said, are fairly common—“site” for “sight” and so forth. It could just be that author Fox decided that the misspellings and occasional misuse of a word here and there would lend authenticity to the experience, making the reader feel that someone had written this journal under duress, bringing out the horrific realism to the piece more fully. Having never read anything else by Fox I can’t say for sure but I will give him the benefit of that doubt. Either way, the minor blemishes to the manuscript in no way detract from the interest of the story.

I enjoyed this book, more so than I expected to. I can’t say why but there’s always the thought in the back of my mind that the next zombie story I read will remind me more of the Day of the Dead “remake” (and every print of that film and everyone behind its making should be bundled up in a rocket and shot into the Sun) than any of Romero’s films. So far I’ve been wrong every time. Some are better than others but all of what I’ve read so far has had something of interest to say. An involving story, one that makes the reader ask “What’s next?” is all we can ask of any book. And this one delivers.

Buy Z Day is Here and Other Zombie Books from Amazon.com

A novel by Max Brooks

Reviewed by Sam Christopher

Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars (Highest Rating)

I’ve never made any bones about my love for zombie fiction. I love the movies, mainly the Romero style but I can deal with virtually any set of parameters for the dead rising, and have since I snuck into a theater to see the original Dawn of the Dead. Then, years later, I ran across the paperback for Dawn of the Dead in a comics store I frequented. I never bought it but over the course of a couple weeks I read the whole thing, and would even read it again later. Then one day I came in and the book was gone and I found myself wishing I’d bought it. Within a week, though, I had found the novelization for the original Night of the Living Dead at another book store. I flipped through this one but didn’t have the money to buy it right then. When I came back a few days later it was gone. I then went for years without seeing any kind of zombie prose. I’m sure it was out there but I just didn’t see it for whatever reason. In the last few years, though, horror and fantasy aimed at the zombie-loving audience has skyrocketed. There are many, many anthologies filled with “walking dead” fiction, novels—some good, some not so good—that might never have found an audience without an organization like Amazon.com to reach its market on a large scale. These are things that years ago would likely have been relegated to the comics and oddball shops run by someone who happened to love the genre, and nowhere else.

Thus, the genre might never have attracted someone with the talent and background of Max Brooks. Brooks, son of comedy great Mel Brooks and actress Anne Bancroft, worked as a writer for Saturday Night Live in the early 2000s. He has also appeared as an actor from what I gather on various shows in bit parts, and as a voice actor on episodes of Batman Beyond and Justice League (both of which I’ve watched but never really paid attention to the actors on them). His first book, The Zombie Survival Guide, is an excellent resource for anyone trying to survive a zombie holocaust (my first rule is: always keep at least half a tank of gas in your car) and also gives a little of the history of zombie outbreaks and attacks on humanity through the ages. I’m guessing Brooks, like me, has always had a fascination with this sub-genre, and so he might have written these books anyway, but one can never know. I do know that having a family to feed can sometimes make decisions for you. Irrespective of that, there is a market for these books now and he did write them.

So let’s talk about World War Z now. This is the story of a man sent by the UN to interview various people around the world on their perspective of the latest zombie outbreak; one that very nearly ended Man’s dominance of the planet. In The Zombie Survival Guide, we were shown various zombie outbreaks from history but these were always shown to be sporadic and, while dangerous locally, never really a threat to Humanity as a whole. This book is different. Even though it is being shown to us in flashback, through the memories of those who have survived it, and we know the war is supposedly over, one never really knows in the world Brooks has created. They think they’ve beaten the Dead back and ended the threat, but then they’ve always thought that before. The book is almost entirely presented in the voices of those who fought first-hand, and gives a truly diverse account of the war from various perspectives and through the lens of different experience. Some of the interviewees are clinical and detached, some are more obviously affected—all are shown to have been marked by the events. Brooks does an excellent job of imbuing these characters with their own personalities, their own mannerisms, and does so in a very believable manner. The reader is really drawn into the story and sometimes we even feel as though we are interviewing the survivors.

For those who haven’t read this book, read it; if you have read it, read it again. One last thing, too: I’ve heard rumor for the last couple of years that this was being made into a motion picture, usually said to be on option to Brad Pitt’s studio with Joe Straczynski having already written the script. No idea. I hear that on occasion but I never see anything being done with it. I know I’d love to see it. But I guess we’ll just have to wait to see what happens.

Buy World War Z Now at Amazon.com

And Order the Next Book from Max Brooks Now – The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks

A Collection of Short Stories in the tradition of pulp horror master H.P. Lovecraft by Michael Vance with illustrations by Earl Geier

Reviewed by Michelle Souliere

Weird Horror Tales, despite its generalized title, collects 13 tales very specifically centered around the fictitious town of “Light’s End” in Maine. While varying in their historic timeframe and even at times in their style, they are all crafted in the weird tales tradition. A great find for fans of this field of fiction!

Unlike many writers who claim to be inspired by Lovecraft, Vance is not afraid to produce stories using an efficient and sparse storytelling technique, which suffers nothing from omission, and lends itself to the very Lovecraftian theme of cosmic horror that rears its indescribable head throughout. The reader is more likely to encounter a poetry-like flow of Bradburyesque proportion than the purple prose of Lovecraft’s fantasy pieces, especially in such stories as “Wishful Thinking.”

His characters are normal, desperate, deranged, owners of strange agendas, people who want basic and harmless lives, and people who want to cause harm to enrich their lives. The settings are reflective of the strange arrangement of the townspeople’s history and continued existence. They live in the shadow of “the Great Secret Hidden Openly.” The length and breadth of the human betrayal taking place in Light’s End is brought into sharp focus when the reader is reminded of the simple, honest need for a good life, even as communicated via the otherworldly narrative in the award-nominated* story “The Lighter Side.”

Humor, the likes of which fans of Tales from the Crypt will appreciate, creeps in from time to time. There is something rottenly appealing in the idea of the faux lighthouse restaurant in “Knock-Off,” with ever-popular tourist-attracting features such as the “irritating moaning of ‘the alien dead, giddy with hunger’, that incessantly gibbered from hidden speakers in the floor,” décor inscribed with “symbols and mermaids with needle teeth,” and “wallpaper that illogically seemed to creep across the wall.”

The wonderful thing about independent publication, and the use of short stories, is the freedom that both give an author to pursue a variety of storytelling techniques, while the collected format allows a common ground for tales to form from. In more ways than one, this collection reminds me of Bradbury. Vance seems to feel a similar need to tie together the ingredients of tragedy and transcendence, and a brave daring to try new storytelling techniques and voices pulled from the fringe of the genre. I can only imagine what will happen if he finds a really keen editor with the ability to help him shape this series into the crescendo it could become (this is the first of 3 planned volumes).

Weird Horror Tales really winds up working as the title for this collection, and Vance’s years of writing experience show in his Jack-of-all-trades approach to fantastic fiction. Take a solid, squirming bedrock of horror, throw in some satellites of sci-fi, a generous helping of Twilight Zone plot twists, lace it with the eldritch horror of H. P. Lovecraft’s favorite poisons, and you have yourself a hefty volume of entertaining and engaging stories which will surprise you with its variety, and reward you with each re-reading.

While I may not be completely sold on Maine as the setting for this series, I understand the effort given to make these stories come alive in a Maine that Vance has never seen, and I more than understand his love for the weird tale, and the honor given Maine by choosing it as the place for these stories, outside of their Midwestern author’s experience of his home state of Oklahoma. Maine is an “other” place. These stories certainly are alive in their other place, a place with a unique kind of strangeness that I think Lovecraft would have been well pleased to see spawned from his legacy.

I would really like Michael Vance to visit Maine as he completes work on the next collection in the planned trilogy of Light’s End anthologies. But then again – maybe if he came here he’d be too charmed to write more Maine-based horror! Perhaps we should simply invite him to come during February to prevent such a tragedy.

* “The Lighter Side” was nominated for the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Fountain Award for Best Short Story in 2004.

This review originally appeared on the Strange Maine blog

Buy Weird Horror Tales now from Amazon.com