I received a free copy of this form NetGalley for review.
I’m generally rooting for the end of humanity these days, but if the apocalypse is gonna invoI received a free copy of this form NetGalley for review.
I’m generally rooting for the end of humanity these days, but if the apocalypse is gonna involve this much walking then I’ll be pretty angry about it because I’d much rather sit on my ass while the asteroid hits or the nukes fly or the zombies start gnawing on me.
A small group of people in rural Pennsylvania start walking in a trance like state one day. They can’t be snapped out of it, needles for sedatives won’t penetrate their skin, and if you try to physically stop one of them things get awfully messy. They don’t need food or water, and they absolutely will not stop. As they move across the country more and more people start joining them.
The public gets increasingly freaked out by these walkers, and a variety of people get pulled into the situation. A tough teenager frantically tries to take care of her younger sister who was the first to start walking. A former CDC doctor who trashed his career for a noble lie tries to learn the cause of the sleepwalking. An aging rock star runs away from his messy life to join the people shepherding the walkers. A preacher begins publicly painting the walkers as harbingers of the apocalypse, and he’s handsomely rewarded for his efforts by a pack of right wing conspiracy theorists who are backing a lying sack of shit for president. Behind it all is a secret that is either the salvation of humanity or its dooooooomm!!
I’ve got very mixed feelings on this one. There’s a lot of stuff I liked, particularly some of the core idea of what’s behind the sleepwalkers once it all gets revealed. There was a pretty cool and clever story to all of that. Wendig also has a readable style that keeps you turning pages, and he’s built up an intriguing scenario here that really held my interest for the first couple of hundred pages. But then the problems started creeping in.
First off, this is way too long. I’m glad I got an e-copy because it’s gotta be a real kitten squisher in print form. And it just doesn’t seem that necessary. There are big swaths of the story where not that much happens. Yeah, some of that was trying to develop characters, but it really doesn’t matter though because for the most part these people are still exactly who I thought they were the entire time. Unfortunately, that means that they’re all jerks or pushovers from start to finish.
Even the ones you’re supposed to sympathize with the most I found irritating and weak. Shana, the older sister of one of the first walkers, is supposed to the tough teenager with a chip on her shoulder, but it all seems like posturing because all she ever really does is be snarky to people. Benjy, the disgraced CDC doctor, should be our hero, but he seems so naïve, helpless, and completely overwhelmed at all times that there’s nothing there to root for. And some of that would make sense in a book like this where people would feel insignificant when faced with something like this, but the structure of the scenario leaves them so little to actually do that they feel completely pointless.
In fact, this entire novel is incredibly passive, and the people in it really don’t matter that much at the end of the day. There’s a few minor things they try to accomplish here and there, but usually they even screw that up. You could take every single other character out of this book and just make it about the sleepwalkers while eventually revealing what’s behind them, and the entire story pretty much ends up exactly where it eventually does. I also didn’t care for what seems like a sequel set up in the end. I’m not sure if that’s the case, but Wendig left plenty of room to return. I’d be more interested in that if I thought that any characters in the book might actually be able to impact the story.
Overall, I didn’t hate this one, but the potential it had early on seems to just fade away as the book goes on and on....more
This is a review of a Stephen King (& Son) novel being posted on Halloween. SPPOOOOKKKKYYYY!!
Eh….Not so much.
Around the world all the women who fall aThis is a review of a Stephen King (& Son) novel being posted on Halloween. SPPOOOOKKKKYYYY!!
Eh….Not so much.
Around the world all the women who fall asleep become enveloped by mysterious cocoons that form almost instantly once they go night-night, and they aren’t waking up. They’re still alive, but if anyone tries to cut or tear open a cocoon the lady inside will pop awake in a psychotic rage in which she’ll immediately try to murder anyone around and then will immediately fall asleep and be cocooned again. (I can relate because I also fly into a homicidal fury if awoken from a nap.)
The small Appalachian town of Dooling is like everywhere else with the women struggling not to fall asleep, but as days pass the number of those awake begin to dwindle. Everything begins to fall apart as some men try to watch over the sleeping women they care for to protect them from jerkfaces who would do them harm. A lady named Evie is arrested for a horrific crime just as everything goes to hell and is locked up in the local women’s prison. Evie shows a supernatural awareness of the people and events around her, and it’s quickly obvious that she’s immune to what’s happening to all the other females. Meanwhile, the sleeping ladies find themselves someplace familiar but very different.
The main idea here is pretty clever as hybrid of a fairy tale story and the beginning an apocalyptic end-of-society-as-we-know-it novel. Trying to get that mixture right is one of the places where I think the book falls down a bit because the more hardnosed elements where people are having to come to terms with what’s happening and prepare for the worst was more compelling than when it went deeper into the paranormal realm aspects of Evie. Yet that’s a vital component to the flip side of the book where we find out what’s going on with the women while they snooze which the book needs. So I’m left struggling to put my finger on why I didn’t like this more.
Maybe the writing itself is a factor. With Uncle Stevie collaborating with Cousin Owen I wasn’t sure what to expect, and you can tell that this isn’t a Stephen King solo effort. It doesn’t feel exactly like one of his novels, but it’s not exactly unlike one either. Even his books co-written with Peter Straub felt more King-ish to me which seems odd. I listened to the audio version of this which included an interview with both authors at the end, and they talked about how instead of trading off chapters or sections that they would leave holes in the middle of what they wrote for the other to fill in a deliberate attempt to keep a reader from figuring out exactly who wrote what. Mission accomplished, but I’m not sure that made for the best book possible.
Another interesting bit in that interview is that this started out as a potential TV series that they wrote some scripts for, and I think that shows through in some of the structure. There’s something that feels episodic about this although again I’m not able to explain exactly why that that is. It’s not all that different from any other book with multiple characters in different locations doing things, but I felt like there were moments when the credits were going to roll. It just reads like a TV show at times is the best way I can explain it.
I’m sure some will be upset at the overall message here which is essentially that women are routinely fucked over by men, and that men overall are pretty awful. (Breaking News: That’s all true.) I admit that there were a few points where I found the male bashing a bit much, but not out of any nutjob MRA style faux indignation about double standards. It’s because I’m a cynic and a misanthrope so I’m fully committed to the belief that deep down all people, men and women, are pure garbage. So while I agree in general that women are less prone to violence as a solution and several other points the book makes I still don’t think that women would make a perfect world. Better? Probably. But not perfect. They’d just find more subtle ways to fuck things up. So for me the Kings’ idea that most women are saints who will always do the right thing that they present here was more wishful thinking than reality.
It’s not a bad book. (Certainly its miles better than The Fireman, another novel written by a King offspring in which a strange disease puts society in peril.) It’s got a good core plot, interesting characters, and decent writing, but it’s too long and never quite gets into the top gear it was straining for. It’ll fall somewhere in the middle of my King rankings....more
T S Eliot wrote that the world would end with a whimper instead of a bang, but if you’re in space or at the frozen wasteland at the top of the planet T S Eliot wrote that the world would end with a whimper instead of a bang, but if you’re in space or at the frozen wasteland at the top of the planet you might not even hear that much when it finally happens.
Augustine is an elderly astronomer who refuses to leave his Arctic research station after an unspecified world emergency causes the evacuation of everyone else there. He soon loses contact with the outside world, but a mysterious young girl becomes his only companion. Meanwhile, Sully is a female astronaut on the spaceship Aether that is returning from a mission to explore the moons of Jupiter, but they’ve lost all contact with Earth even though their equipment is functioning perfectly. The unsettling silence from home and what it means begins to deeply affect the crew.
Augustine and Sully, with one surrounded by ice and the other floating through a merciless vacuum, may be in vastly different circumstances, but they have a lot in common, too. They’re both people who deliberately avoided family entanglements and steady domestic lives to pursue their scientific dreams. In his younger days Augustine was always ready to move on to the next observatory once his chronic womanizing had worn out his welcome somewhere. Sully left her daughter in the care of her ex-husband to pursue her quest of going into space. Their isolation and fear make both of them reflect on their lives as they wonder if their choices had any meaning at all one way or another considering the now silent Earth.
This one belongs to be shelved along with other literary apocalypses like The Road or Station Eleven although this is definitely it’s own thing. (However, the cover certainly appears to be designed to evoke Station Eleven.) It’s extremely well written, and at about 250 pages it doesn’t have a wasted word. It’s by far the quietest end of the world story I’ve read, and that’s fitting with its settings as well as the lack of noise from Earth being the thing that lets you know something has gone terribly wrong.
It’s also got some nicely straightforward and pragmatic descriptions about the logistics of life in a mostly abandoned scientific station and a state of the art spaceship rocketing towards home. There’s enough to make both these places feel vivid, but whereas some books of this type become all about how you survive end-of-the-world scenarios this one keeps it focus on the inner lives of its two main characters which ends up being more compelling than how Augustine gets a snowmobile started or Sully helps fix a problem on her ship.
It’s the silence and the questions about what may have happened that lurk in the background here and give the book a haunting quality, but those questions end up being relatively unimportant. It’s the story of these two people and their deeper connections that really matters. (view spoiler)[ I’ll admit to feeling like a bit of an idiot that I didn’t pick up that Augustine is Sully’s long lost father sooner than I did. That piece could have made this all very hokey, but I think it works in the context of this story. (hide spoiler)]
I received a free advanced copy of this for review from the publisher....more
It had a promising start with the outbreak of a disease known as Dragonscale which first manifests as dark marksWell, that was a spoonful of nonsense.
It had a promising start with the outbreak of a disease known as Dragonscale which first manifests as dark marks on the skin. Getting a free tribal tattoo might not sound that bad, but the real problem is that eventually infected people burst into flames and burn to death. The damage caused by walking blowtorches and the fear of being infected have society teetering on the brink of collapse.
Harper is a young nurse who discovers that she has contracted Dragonscale and she’s pregnant. If that isn’t bad enough her jerk-face husband Jakob goes coocoo for Coco-Puffs and thinks they should just kill themselves. During a desperate moment Harper finds help in the form of a mysterious guy dressed as a fireman who leads her to a hidden community of infected people who have found a way to survive the disease. Unfortunately, discord within that group proves as dangerous as the vigilante Cremation Squads that have started murdering the infected.
It’s a strong premise, but unfortunately there’s a number of factors that drag it down. First and foremost is that it’s way too long. Hill can’t seem to commit to one main story, and he keeps adding on to it like a late-night TV commercial promising, “But that’s not all!” This causes a lot of drift with a long swath of the book not even touching on what’s going on in the outside world and forgetting what should be major characters for long periods of time. It’s also like one of those action movies that never seems to know when to end that goes on 20 minutes past the point where it should have wrapped things up.
I also wasn’t a fan of Harper, and since this whole story is built on the idea of a plucky heroine trying to survive a civilization ending plague then I needed to have at least have some respect for her. Unfortunately, she comes across as twit who never seems to wise up until something terrible happens. Which it does. Repeatedly. I lost count of the number of times where she is shocked by the bad intentions of someone and says things like, “You can’t!” It’s the apocalype, lady. They can, and they will. Her infatuation with Mary Poppins, and Hill’s constant use of it and its songs are also way overdone.
In fact, there’s just too much goddamn music in this book overall with constant quoting of lyrics and talking about various musicians. It's a crutch Hill leans on far too often. Plus, it’s all Jurassic Rock with a smattering of ‘80s pop in there with even an old VJ from MTV having a role to play. It’s 2016, Joe Hill. I don’t need your main character, who is supposedly in her early twenties, lecturing me on what the preference for the Rolling Stones or the Beatles says about a person.
Another piece that flies off this jalopy of a book once it gets up to speed is the nature of the disease itself. There’s a lot of effort spent to convince us that there is a rational scientific reason that people would turn into Zippos, and I can suspend disbelief enough to go with that concept. But when more and more is added to the point where we’re into ideas like people being able to generate and control fire without their clothes burning and even more weirdness then you don’t need Neal deGrasse Tyson to call bullshit on it. Just as he couldn’t seem to commit to one story or another Hill can’t seem to decide if he wanted a more grounded concept with some science behind it or if he wanted to jump full-on into the supernatural pool.
Hill also opted to run home to Daddy in this because the entire book is absolutely rotten with Easter eggs of Stephen King’s work. A few references can be fun, but when Hill essentially ‘borrows’ a character from The Stand including a cute little name trick to underline it then it’s crossed the line. (Harold Cross? For a character who is essentially Harold Lauder? That's weak.*) After a while it started to seem desperate, as if Hill knew things weren’t going well and hoped he might use fan familiarity of his father's books to invoke some of his magic. Hill also seems to have inherited his father’s trait of having a bunch of characters claim that they’re are critically short of time only to have them waste most of it with idle chit-chat and banter that is supposed to be funny and make you like the characters. It’s not, and it doesn’t.
So at this point Hill is 2 for 4 with me, and after this I’m going to need a really good reason to pick up his next one.
* And I didn't think about this until I read Edward Lorn's review where he pointed out that there's also a deaf character named Nick. Come on, Joe Hill. You're better than that....more
Arthur Leander is a famous actor who suffers a heart attack and dies on stage just before a deadly version of the This is one well written apocalypse.
Arthur Leander is a famous actor who suffers a heart attack and dies on stage just before a deadly version of the swine flu kills most of humanity. Station Eleven then uses Arthur as the center of a web of connections that we learn from the people in his life before, during and after the disease wipes out the world as we know it. Kirsten sees Arthur die as a child actor, and years later she’s part of the Traveling Symphony that tours the small towns of the post-apocalyptic landscape. Jeevan is an ex-paparazzo turned paramedic who once stalked Arthur, but he is in the audience when the actor keels over and tries to save his life. Miranda is Arthur’s first wife who could never adjust to the spotlight his fame brought and wrote a comic book about a space station as a hobby. Clark was one of Arthur’s best friends who gets stranded far from home when things really start to fall apart.
The thing that astonishes me most about his is just how deftly Emily St. John Mandel portrays the end of the world. There’s no shortage of post-apocalyptic scenarios out there, but whether the culprits are zombies or nuclear weapons or killer viruses the aftermath is generally as brutal as an ax blow to the face. Mandel writes with such an understated elegance that there’s a dark beauty and grace to her fallen world even as she acknowledges all the hardship and horrors of it.
She also does a masterful job of managing the structure with its shifting third party perspectives at various times. All the links and coincidences could have felt very forced and ultimately pointless, but again it’s her skill at making us interested in all of these people at their various stages of pre and post apocalypse that make it all work so that the connections feel organic and not simply plot points.
While the post-apocalyptic world seems believable for the most part there are some quibbles I could make. Mandel writes this as if a flu with a near 100% mortality rate would essentially wipe out all the accumulated knowledge and technical ability of the survivors and takes everyone back to an almost medieval way of life.
It’s weird that everything has been so ransacked just fifteen years later because the math doesn’t seem right there. If 99% of the US died within days so that there was no prolonged destructive cycle to use up resources, that'd be roughly 3 million people left in a country that had all the crap that 300 million people accumulated. Yet, Kristen is amazed to find a house in the woods that had not been searched where she finds a dress to replace hers that is worn out. Or guns and ammo are portrayed as being increasingly rare even though America has enough guns that each survivor could have about 1000 each. Books also seem to be in short supply as if the libraries were also killed by the flu.
So those would be some serious flaws in the premise if you were judging this solely on criteria like world building (Or world destroying.) and plausibility, but it didn’t lower my opinion much because this just isn’t that kind of book. It’s more interested at exploring human connections as well as providing a reminder that we’re living in an age of unappreciated wonders that is a lot more fragile than we want to admit, and at that Mandel succeeds exceedingly well....more
A bunch of people live in an underground community and those who break the rules are cruelly expelled to their doom? Reality TV producers have to be kA bunch of people live in an underground community and those who break the rules are cruelly expelled to their doom? Reality TV producers have to be kicking themselves for not coming up with this idea themselves.
At an undetermined time in the future, the people of the Silo have lived for generations with only a few dusty camera views to show them the world above ground. After the sheriff steps down from his post in rather dramatic fashion, the mayor and a deputy determine that a mechanic named Juliette is the best candidate to replace him, but her appointment results in a series of events that threaten to expose long kept secrets and tear the Silo apart.
Hugh Howey is one of the biggest success stories in self-publishing, and I understand why after the early chapters do an exceptional job of introducing us to this world. The stairwell is a vertical highway connecting the complex, and journeying from top to bottom is no easy task. Having two characters make the trek in the early part of the book was a great way of giving us a tour of the Silo that established not only how it works logistically, but how it functions as a society. Juliette started out as a very strong character against this vivid background, and Howe sets her up perfectly as the hero to carry the story.
Unfortunately, he seemed to have some problems with what to do after that, and I was slightly let down at where the plot went from there. I can’t say much about that without giving the book away though. (view spoiler)[
I was disappointed that Juliette wasn’t given more to do in the sheriff’s role and as a character overall. In fact, while Bernard made for a great villain with his infuriating arrogance, he was so ahead of Juliette at every turn that it made her disappointingly passive. While she takes plenty of actions during the course of the story, none of them really accomplish anything.
Juliette doesn’t uncover the conspiracy; her friend in IT finds the data that clues her into what’s going on although she does figure out the bit about the suits being deliberately made badly. Before she can really do anything as sheriff she’s almost instantly demoted and sent out to clean and only survives that because her friends swapped the faulty parts of the suit. That kicks off the whole rebellion, but Juliette has no part of it. At the other Silo she spends most of her time trying to get a pump working and almost dies doing so, but again, that doesn’t resolve anything in this story. Finally, in the end, she again almost dies because she accidently tries to save the life of the villain of the story, and we learn that Bernard wasn’t bested because of anything she did, rather it was all done by other people.
Part of this is disconnection is because of the structure of the plot. Sending Juliette out of the Silo automatically cuts her out of the action that takes place for the rest of the story. Her dangers mainly come from her environment, not because of anything connected to the plot although an argument could be made that Howey was trying to put in some kind of theme about her overcoming the elements since she almost dies by earth and air (Surviving the toxins and asphyxiation after being sent out to clean.), water and then fire.
One of her Big Damn Hero moments is supposed to be her rushing up the stairs of the second Silo when she’s completely exhausted because she’s desperate to get back into radio contact with her friends, but what exactly was that going to accomplish even if she had gotten back in touch of them? Essentially the character's major achievement is that she suffers and endures so that she can continue to suffer and endure.
So I found it very disappointing that we had a good character that I wanted to root for as the lead in the story, but she felt removed from the action with little actual impact on the plot. It’s kind of sad that Howey built up such a great sci-fi setting and then pushed the best character away from it to have her explore something similar but decayed and mostly empty.
I was also wishing that the story would have been more than a vast conspiracy storyline. The idea that all the silos were part of some centuries old evil master plan was OK, but I think it would have been far more interesting if the situation in the Silo was the result of internal conflicts that had built up over the decades. Juliette and Bernard at war with each other in the Silo is a story I’m more interested in than just another plot about unspeakable secrets kept from a society. (hide spoiler)]
Overall, Howey created a well written sci-fi tale with an intriguing setting that I was very interested in, but unfortunately, I found the plot and actions taken by the characters far less compelling. I don’t regret reading this, but I probably won’t be checking out the follow-up books to it. ...more
It’s pretty telling that for a long time I was snatching up new Walking Dead collections as soon as they came out, but I read Vol. 17 over a year ago It’s pretty telling that for a long time I was snatching up new Walking Dead collections as soon as they came out, but I read Vol. 17 over a year ago and didn’t get around to picking this one up until now.
I used to think that the on-going nature of the comics which enabled it to be an endless fall into the depths of despair was one of the selling points for this series. The idea that things could always get worse and then did made it unique. I thought the format really let them explore just how hopeless a zombie apocalypse could be.
However, after watching the show which seems to be loop of frustration occasionally redeemed by a great episode or ‘Holy shit!’ moment, and the last volume which featured an incredibly brutal and graphic death of a major character, Walking Dead finally popped the fuse controlling my taste for exploring just how bad things can get. At this point the on-going nature has started to work against it for me since I saw no end to the carnage and someday it would be just the last two living people on earth fighting over a can of beans right before being eaten by zombies.
So this storyline featuring Negan and his group of Saviors seemed like we’d just be repeating the whole Governor/prison thing, and I wasn’t that interested. However, this collection does a fair job of trying to establish Negan a bit beyond just another crazy war lord of the zombie apocalypse, and the way that Rick is working on a plan that involves other survivor communities seems like it could offer a bit of hope that the characters of Walking Dead are at long last trying to claw their way out of their daily nightmare instead of just surviving it. ...more
I think that one of the bright spots about knowing that an asteroid is going to hit the Earth would be that no one cou(I won this ARC from Goodreads.)
I think that one of the bright spots about knowing that an asteroid is going to hit the Earth would be that no one could ever say again, “Cheer up. It’s not the end of the world!”
There are only a few days left until the hunk of space rock called Maia will collide with the Earth and almost certainly wipe out humanity. Hank Palace, a former police detective, is on one last case of a highly personal nature. He’s trying to track down his rebellious sister Nico who is with a group she claims can stop the asteroid by locating a scientist who is being held as part of some kind of vast conspiracy that is allowing Maia to impact Earth.
With his dog and a talented scrounger he’s not sure he can entirely trust, Hank has made his way through complete anarchy on his way from New England to a police station in small Ohio town where his last clue has led him to believe Nico and her wacky pals are waiting to rendezvous with the scientist. However, when they arrive instead of finding Nico, Hank makes a couple of other shocking discoveries. Can he solve the mystery of his missing sister before time runs out once and for all?
I don’t think I’ve ever done such a 180 on a character like I have on Hank Palace. In The Last Policeman when Maia was six months out and society was still pretty much intact, Hank was an earnest detective whose insistence on doing things by the book and dogged determination at mounting a murder investigation in the face of Armageddon made him seem like his own denial and urge to play cop wasted the time of other people, and wasting someone else’s time seems almost as bad as murder in this scenario. (Now that I’ve read all three books, I’m going to give The Last Policeman an extra star.)
However, in Countdown City when Hank was no longer a cop but still followed an investigation to the bitter end, he seemed more like a guy just trying to cling to some semblance of responsibility and decency even as everyone else was running off to fulfill their bucket list, committing suicide or just going crazy. Here, with only days left Hank still thinks that there’s a proper way to do things, and he continues to take extensive notes when talking to people and walks around a dead body like the CSI guys are going to show up at any moment to process the evidence.
It’s not exactly denial because Hank knows full well what’s coming and that he has very little time to find Nico, but he’s still helpless to resist his compulsion to know every little detail as if he can die satisfied if only he knew the whole story.
Ben Winters also showed a low key strain of creative world ending in how he’s established the way that that things have fallen apart gradually over the course of this trilogy. Hank started out as a patrolman getting to live his dream of being a detective when other cops have started walking off the job and there were still some structure and rules in place. Now that the end is really near, Hank is just another guy wandering through dangerous territory trying to satisfy one last personal quest before the big boom.
This ended up being an exceptionally good story with a great premise that Winters fully delivered on with his flawed but ultimately relatable main character.
One final note, and this is a total spoiler about the ending. (view spoiler)[I also give Winters a lot of credit for actually going ahead and ending the world. With Nico’s story about the scientist in the last book, I was worried that he’d go the route of some kind of conspiracy thriller in which Hank ends up saving the world from Maia or something along those lines. I’m very glad that the whole thing turned out to be a lie and that Hank spent his final hours seeking companionship rather than answers. (hide spoiler)]...more
I am a weak and cowardly person so if I knew that he world was about to end, I’d probably spend my final moments just crying, cursing the universe andI am a weak and cowardly person so if I knew that he world was about to end, I’d probably spend my final moments just crying, cursing the universe and generally acting like Bill Paxton in Aliens. "Game over, man! Game over!"
Hank Palace is better man than I am, or at least he’s able to divert himself from the upcoming apocalypse by playing detective. In The Last Policeman, Earth had learned that a giant asteroid was coming to send humanity out the same way the dinosaurs bought it. Hank was a young police officer in New Hampshire who had gotten promoted when large numbers of cops had wandered away to go ‘bucket list’. Law and order were being maintained by automatic jail sentences that would put anyone in a cell into the end of the world, but there were serious cracks starting to appear in society.
Countdown City picks up Hank’s story with only 77 days left before the asteroid hits, and the decline of civilization has accelerated. Hank and the other detectives have all been fired as the police are only being used as a show of force on the streets to keep things from falling totally apart. An old friend contacts Hank to ask him to find her husband Brett who has gone missing. With everyone going bucket list to spend their final days fulfilling their dreams, it would seem that Brett just took as so many others have, but Brett was a former state policeman known for his honorable nature so abandoning his wife doesn't seem like his style. Hank is also worried about his sister Nico who has gotten involved with a fringe radical group that thinks there’s some vast government conspiracy involving the asteroid.
The Last Policemen had a great concept, but I found Hank kind of irritating. It’s obvious that since being a detective had always been his dream that he was fulfilling his own bucket list by playing cop, and his rule-abiding nature seemed silly with the end near. Plus, he appeared to have no self-awareness or guilt about how his actions wasted the precious time of others or caused them even worse repercussions. It wasn’t really clear if Winters was trying to portray Hank as a hero doing his job until the bitter end or if he was meant to be seen as this desperate guy using a murder investigation to avoid dealing with what was coming.
That comes more into focus in Countdown City because Hank has no authority. He can only waste his own time, and if that’s how he chooses to spend the last days, then so be it. Plus, he gets called out multiple time by others who question the idea of chasing a missing husband when the world is going to end in less than 3 months. Even though Hank continues to push things long past a point when most of us would in similar circumstances, he comes across as more tragic and helpless to resist his impulse to find answers. When confronted when some harsh truths, Hank finally does acknowledge reality and starts facing up to it.
Winters has done a nice job in these two books of building a believable scenario of what would happen if everyone on Earth knew that the end was coming, and I particularly like how the breakdown started on low heat in the first book and comes to a boil in this one. I’m very much looking forward to the third book and seeing how Winters wraps this story up....more
Rick’s group of survivors thought that their recent success in wiping out a huge herd of zombies along with finding that there were other communities Rick’s group of survivors thought that their recent success in wiping out a huge herd of zombies along with finding that there were other communities nearby that they could start trading with had provided the first rays of sunshine in the long dark night that is The Walking Dead.
However, long time readers shouldn’t be surprised that was just writer Robert Kirkman setting us up like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown to kick. If you’re familiar with this series and still ended up flat on your back after he yanked the ball away, you got nobody to blame but yourself.
Following the classic lesson of George Romero, Kirkman again demonstrates that while zombies may be dangerous, it’s other people that are really terrifying. When Rick learned that the neighboring community had problems with a group called the Saviors, he thought that his battle-tested crew of crusty veterans was more than a match for some gang working a post-apocalyptic version of the protection racket. Unfortunately, Rick is wrong.
So very, very wrong.
The Saviors turn out to have a lot more members than anyone knew about, and their leader, Negan, is a vicious bastard who will make Rick wistfully think about the good ole days when he only had to deal with the Governor.
Seriously, (view spoiler)[ the scene where Rick and the others are helpless to do anything but watch as poor Glenn is beaten to death by Negan with a baseball bat was as hard to read as anything done yet in this series. And that’s saying something. (hide spoiler)]
So once again all is lost, and if you think it might get better soon, the next collection will be titled Abandon All Hope.* You know, just in case you hadn’t already…
*(I learned that they've changed the title of the next volume to What Comes After and ruined my joke. Thanks for nothing, Kirkman!)
It’s like all the best parts of The Road, The Walking Dead and Winter’s Bone.
Temple is a fifteen year old girl who has grown up in the ruins of AmeriIt’s like all the best parts of The Road, The Walking Dead and Winter’s Bone.
Temple is a fifteen year old girl who has grown up in the ruins of America following the zombie apocalypse. She wanders the remains like a post-apocalyptic tourist looking at the wonders created by a 'slick god' and encountering a variety of people along the way. Supremely capable and confident, Temple has little problem surviving and dispatching the 'meatskins' she runs across, but she winds up with a determined killer on her trail.
This is one of those books that fuses genre with literature, and it’s one of the best I’ve read that’s attempted that trick. Incredible writing not only establishes a completely new society and an unforgettable heroine as well as a rich supporting cast that’s well-plotted, it’s also all done is less than 250 pages. I got way more out this than the hundreds of pages of Justin Cronin’s bloated version of a monster apocalypse or Mira Grant’s overstuffed and repetitive take on the aftermath of a zombie uprising.
I found it a bit unbelievable that over a decade after the zombies took over that Temple can still find edible supplies in convenience stores and working cars so easily. Also, (view spoiler)[ I could have lived without the mutant inbred redneck clan. Zombies and dangerous humans were enough of a threat. This came close to pushing a story that had seemed incredibly realistic into horror movie territory. (hide spoiler)]
These are relatively minor gripes about a haunting story that’s going to stick with me. ...more
(I originally rated this three stars but after completing the entire trilogy and getting a much better idea about the character of Hank Palace, I've b(I originally rated this three stars but after completing the entire trilogy and getting a much better idea about the character of Hank Palace, I've boosted it to four.)
Three men are playing cards when someone runs up and tells them that the world is ending. The first man says, “I’m going to go pray.” The second man says, “I’m going to get drunk and sleep with six whores. The third man says, “I will finish the game.”
I learned that little parable from Young Guns 2, and I kept thinking about it while reading this. It seems like you’d want to be the kind of person who would finish the game, but what if that meant everyone else has to keep going too so that they get stuck spending their last moments playing cards? Then that guy is kind of an asshole, and that’s the way I felt about Detective Hank Palace.
A giant asteroid named Maia is going to hit the Earth in about six months, and no one will survive the initial impact or the global after effects. Law and order still prevail, but the cracks are starting to show as cell phone networks are getting spotty and the Internet is failing. One of the biggest problems is that many people have ‘gone bucket list’ and are walking away from jobs to live out their dreams.
Hank Palace benefits from this because the numerous openings in the police department of Concord New Hampshire get him moved from a patrol officer with a year’s experience to detective which is what he’s always wanted to be. Unfortunately for him, the other cops in his squad have mentally checked out and most of the police work consists of cutting down the people who have hung themselves. When Hank is working what looks like another routine case of suicide in a fast food joint's restroom, he sees some oddities that make him think it’s a homicide, but no one except him seems to care.
This is a helluva an intriguing concept. I particularly liked how the fabric of society is portrayed as starting to fray at the edges. Most people who are working are doing so only because they need money to live until Maia hits so motivation levels are pretty low. One especially clever touch is that the US government has enacted emergency laws that allows citizens to be jailed without trial for minor offenses, and this means that getting arrested is essentially a death sentence since you’ll be held in a cell until the big boom. So while there is some black market stuff going on, the criminals are terrified of getting caught, and this has kept a lid on illegal activity.
The thing that dragged this story down for me was the character of Hank. He’s an earnest rule abider and eager young detective at a point where the rules don’t matter much and nobody really wants to investigate anything. He’s determined to finish the game, and that should make him admirable. The problem is that Hank’s dream was always to be a detective which means that he is living out his personal bucket list instead of seeming noble by carrying on with his duty. It’s also his way of avoiding dealing with the impending doom, and he never sees the irony when he repeatedly says, “A man is dead.” as a justification for his insistence on pushing the investigation when no one else cares.
And I gotta say, I’m kind of on the side of the other people in this book. Hank is oblivious to the impact his investigation has on anyone else. When he demands an autopsy, the coroner coldly tells him that she’s missing her daughter’s music recital to do it and asks him if he knows how many more recitals she’ll get to see. But Hank doesn’t care. A man is dead slightly ahead of the rest of the human race, and he’s determined to find out who did it even if he wastes the precious time of other people. To me, the cost was too high. (view spoiler)[Particularly bad is when Hank demands that the dead man’s boss requests some missing records from the home office even when the man tearfully tells Hank that it will mean the loss of his job, and he has no savings so he and his wife will have no means of support until the end. Hank still insists, and coldly dismisses the man’s breakdown as someone using Maia as an excuse for poor behavior. As predicted, the man loses his job because of this, and it turns out Hank didn’t even need the records after all. But Hank could care less that someone will spend their final months in poverty because of him. (hide spoiler)]
This could have been interesting if Hank was played up as more of an obsessive jerk, and while there are a few moments like that, it still feels like the author was trying to say that Hank is the hero while everyone else is letting a little thing like the coming apocalypse turn them into a bunch of slackers
This was a great concept with an interesting angle on an end of the world story, but my dislike of the main character soured me quite a bit. I’m on the fence as to whether I’ll read the rest of the trilogy.
What’s this? Faint signs of hope? A small sliver of optimism in a world filled with death and despair? I must have picked up the wrong book. This can’What’s this? Faint signs of hope? A small sliver of optimism in a world filled with death and despair? I must have picked up the wrong book. This can’t be a Walking Dead collection. Let me check the cover….. Huh. I’ll be damned.
Rick and the small community of people who have managed to avoid becoming zombie chow are trying to find enough food to survive a winter and keep the undead from bunching up at their walls when a stranger shows up. The guy looks like Jesus and has the fighting skills of the X-Men’s Gambit, and he’s got a story that seems too good to be true.
Jesus Gambit claims to be the representative of a community of over two hundred people who have carved out a safe zone and trades with other communities in the area, and he wants Rick’s people to join in. Since Rick has had some pretty shitty luck with strangers, he is more than wary of Jesus Gambit’s offer. In fact, some worry that Rick’s suspicion is going to cause Jesus Gambit’s people to not work with them.
In a normal Walking Dead story, everything should go to hell with lots of people getting dead, and Rick ending up in ever more desperate circumstances. But there’s a change in this that could be the beginning of a new phase where Rick and company begin to build a new world rather than just try to survive the wreckage of the old one.
Or Kirkman could just pull the rug out from under them and have a whole bunch of them eaten by zombies or murdered or raped or have their limbs chopped off, etc. etc.
Looking back at it, I’m not even sure why I read this book. The Passage left so little impression on me that I remembered almost nothing about it and Looking back at it, I’m not even sure why I read this book. The Passage left so little impression on me that I remembered almost nothing about it and could barely muster the energy to look on-line for a summary of it. So why read another 500 pages of that story? Maybe it was the hype? Or because I’m such a sucker for post-apocalyptic stories?
Actually, I now think that these books are like one of those B-level restaurants that you end up eating at all the time, but you don’t really know why. The food is just OK and the price is right and it’s close to your house and you never got a nasty case of the screaming greasies after eating there, but it’s not a place you’d recommend to any of your friends or pass up a decent frozen pizza for a meal there. Much like one of these middle-of-the-road restaurants provides gut pack for your belly, these books are gut pack for the mind. It’s not terrible, but you can think of a lot better options.
Which is weird because it’s a horror novel going for epic scale with no shortage of blood and monsters so you’d think it’d elicit some kind of response. Instead it just kept reminding me of other things I liked more. A post-apocalyptic world with a huge battle between good and evil is more satisfying in The Stand. Playing with the idea of different strains of vampires is done much better in Scott Snyder’s American Vampire comics. The crazy vampire lady concept was a lot more fun when Drusilla did it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Blade wielding Alicia certainly resembles Alice in the Resident Evil films. (You know a book isn’t entertaining you much when you start daydreaming about watching Resident Evil movies instead of reading it.)
I don’t know if it’s because of his background writing the Serious Lit-A-Chur (I haven’t read any of his other books.), but it felt like Cronin glumly slogged through this and that his pulse rate never jumped once. If you’re going to write a post-apocalyptic novel, there needs to be a certain amount of inappropriate excitement involved. I read something by Stephen King once where he talked about taking grim satisfaction in destroying the world in The Stand and when you read that, you can feel the dark glee he took in just smashing the whole thing. Cronin just doesn't seem like he’s that into it. Why bother writing the end of civilization if you’re not gonna have some fun with it?
Part of the problem may be that Cronin skips over that phase for the most part. He showed us the beginnings of the vampire plague but then jumped forward by decades so we never really got to see things come undone. I think it’s telling that the part I enjoyed the most in both books was the glimpse we got of the world going belly up during the outbreak with Kittridge, Danny the autistic bus driver and all the others. That’s the one part of the book where the characters seemed distinctly different from one another and where there’s some real passion flowing. Even though I found the character of Lila extremely annoying because a pregnant surgeon who avoids dealing the with the on-going apocalypse by going crazy town banana pants and acting like nothing is wrong should be the first one to get her blood drained, at least she evoked some kind of reaction from me. Whereas the other characters in the book were essentially a big shrug.
This book is such a yawn that I had a hard time deciding on whether to give it 2 or 3 stars. I finally decided that giving it 2 stars would actually mean that I cared enough to downgrade it. But I don’t. This thing is the epitome of average so 3 stars it is....more
This may be a case where the filmed adaptation of material is influencing my opinion of something I read. In this case, that’s not a good thing.
I’ve bThis may be a case where the filmed adaptation of material is influencing my opinion of something I read. In this case, that’s not a good thing.
I’ve been a big fan of The Walking Dead for several years now, but it’s always had its flaws like clunky dialogue and characters spouting off long speeches about what they are feeling rather than letting the story or the art do some of the heaving lifting. I’ve been willing to overlook that because I was impressed with the way that Kirkman’s on-going zombie apocalypse was willing to explore the limits of what people will do to survive and what that costs them in the long run.
However, while watching the TV version of the story, I’ve found myself beyond irritated. The show can be occasionally brilliant, but it’s also prone to long boring patches that consist of characters rehashing old concerns and arguments over and over. (The show also has the bad habit of having its characters behave like total morons and do unbelievably stupid things just to advance the plot, but that’s another issue.)
This one mainly concerns the aftermath of a massive battle in the last volume. For the first time, Rick and the others managed to make a stand and protect a fortified position against a huge herd of zombies. Rick now thinks that that the only way to guarantee safety is to work as a community. (Wait, a bunch of people working together for a mutual goal to protect the welfare of all? That sounds like socialism to me. A real American would rather get his brain chewed by zombies!)
While it seems like we’ve maybe hit a big turning point in the series with Rick now trying to develop a long range plan to protect and grow their town, this volume is a lotta talk and not much action. The series has always featured interludes that usually lead to an acceleration of their descent into the depths of hell, but this one seems exceptionally slow and repetitive in a lot of ways. I think that’s because the memory of the long boring time on the farm in the second season is still fresh in my mind.
Also, (view spoiler)[ I really don’t buy that Carl could still be alive after getting half his head blown off. This is the second time that he’s been shot by accident so that idea seems about as fresh as a decaying zombie. (hide spoiler)]
Hopefully, Kirkman will come up with something terrible to inflict on his characters in the next one....more
Millions of people vanish in the blink of an eye leaving everyone left on Earth feeling like God just told them, “It’s not you, it’s me….”
It’s been thMillions of people vanish in the blink of an eye leaving everyone left on Earth feeling like God just told them, “It’s not you, it’s me….”
It’s been three years since the Sudden Departure, and the mayor of Mapleton, Kevin Garvey, is trying to get the town back to a feeling of normalcy. However, Kevin’s family was profoundly impacted by the disappearances. His wife Laurie has left him to join a cult of white-clad chain smokers called the Guilty Remnant who silently stalk people while son Tom dropped out of college to follow a man called Holy Wayne who offers hugs as comfort. Kevin is left with his teenage daughter Jill and her best friend who has moved in with them to get away from the creepy stepfather she was left with when her mom went poof. The girls are blowing off class to get drunk and high at parties that seem more depressing than fun. Another key figure in Mapleton is Nora Durst whose husband and two children vanished, and she’s been made a reluctant symbol of the mass loss.
While there are no definite answers as to what exactly happened to the missing people; the implication is that most of them believe deep down that this was a religious judgment of some kind. However, while it seems to fit the template of the Christian Rapture, people of all faiths from all over the world were taken while some hard core believers were not, and those who vanished were seemingly just as flawed in their lives as those who remain. So those left behind walk around feeling like they were judged and found wanting. Even worse is that since they don’t know what the criteria was, there’s no way to know why they didn't make the cut.
The real bitch of this is because these people have realized that the biggest event in human history occurred, and they were left out of it. Now they’re supposed to…..what? Go to work? Study for a test? Join a cult? Start a softball league?
There’s an unspoken belief among them that the real story is taking place with the people who departed, and the ones left are just a minor footnote at best. That’s the creepy vibe that haunts the book and makes the idea really work. There aren’t any huge apocalyptic battles to fight or horrors to endure, just that feeling that they’ve been abandoned and not knowing how to react to it. Can any of them find a reason to go on? Is it even worth trying?
I read this after seeing the TV series on HBO which I found disturbing on a lot of levels. While the basic plot and most of the characters are the same, the show seems to be hinting that there is still something looming, that this was just the first act which makes sense since most of the book's plot was used in the first season so it needs more story to tell. That gives the show a different spin because there’s more rage and craziness while the book is more about quiet despair....more
When the zombie apocalypse comes there’ll be a lot of inconveniences. The breakdown of society, lack of electrical power, no hot showers and undead caWhen the zombie apocalypse comes there’ll be a lot of inconveniences. The breakdown of society, lack of electrical power, no hot showers and undead cannibals trying to eat your brains will definitely suck, but I always figured that the trade-off was that at least there’d be no more paying bills, standing in line at the DMV or having to tolerate corporate buzz words and slogans.
But in Zone One not only are there plenty of zombies, there’s still silly bureaucratic rules and paperwork as well as a government more concerned with public perception than in actually accomplishing anything. It’s like the worst of everything.
Mark Spitz (a nickname explained late in the book) was completely average and his only real talent seemed to be a knack for coasting through life with a minimum of fuss. Once the zombie apocalypse comes, Mark Spitz’s ability to get by served him well and allowed him to escape the initial zombie outbreak and survive in the aftermath.
Now Mark Spitz is one of the sweepers assigned to clean-up Manhattan. The surviving government in Buffalo sent the Marines through to kill the most vicious zombies, but there’s a remaining element of ‘stragglers’, about 1% of the undead who just return to old homes or jobs and seem vapor locked there as they mindlessly watch blank tv screens or punch buttons on dead copy machines.
Buffalo has rebranded the refugee camps of survivors with names like Happy Acres and has a plan to clear and repopulate New York. As Mark Spitz spends his days popping and dropping stragglers, he reflects on his aimless days before the zombie outbreak on Last Night and his time as a wandering refugee before he was found by Buffalo’s army.
This is the first book I’m aware of that tries to do the zombie genre as Very Serious Literature. (No, Pride & Prejudice & Zombies doesn’t count.) Overall, it succeeds remarkably well. Mark Spitz’s reflections on pre and post zombie life are intriguing and his melancholy drifting through his days cleaning out Manhattan have the feel of a guy eulogizing an entire world. My only complaint is that the memories and current events sometimes get so tangled that it made it a tad confusing at times to figure out where we were in the story of Mark Spitz.
On the zombie front, Whitehead delivers some tense and horrific action in the encounters with the undead. (In fact, Whitehead delivered more zombie fightin’ action and detailed descriptions of the walking dead in 240 pages than Mira Grant has in her two 500+ page horror genre novels. Read this and take notes, Mira.)
I especially liked the idea that the government in Buffalo has started doing asinine things like issuing orders against the sweepers doing more property damage than necessary while clearing buildings and prohibiting looting while also issuing pamphlets about the dangers of zombie post-traumatic stress disorder. It seems kind of insane at first but after thinking about it a while, I came to the conclusion that it was highly likely that the political image consultants and corporate marketing whizzes would probably, like cockroaches, be the ones to survive a zombie apocalypse and promptly start trying to rebuild the world the only way they know how, conning people into doing shit even if it flies in the face of common sense.
Great book that elevates the entire horror genre. It doesn’t take the #1 spot from my favorite zombie novel, World War Z but I think it’s got a lock on the #2 spot for now. ...more
- each volume acts like a small black hole aThe Walking Dead series is soooooo dark….
“How dark is it, Kemper?”
The Walking Dead series is so dark that:
- each volume acts like a small black hole and immediately sucks all available light out of any room they’re placed in.
- it used to give wardrobe advice to Johnny Cash.
- Stephen King considered calling the Dark Tower series The Walking Dead Tower.
- people who have read it have then watched Requiem for a Dream to cheer themselves up.
- Andrew Vachss had to stop reading it because it was too grim for him.
- whenever sales of anti-depressants drop off, the pharmaceutical companies start handing out free copies.
- that it apparently drove the AMC executives mad and led to them firing Frank Darabont in a cost cutting measure on the highest rated show it ever aired.
And this one is worse than usual. So if you like your zombie apocalypses to plumb the depths of despair and the limits of humanity, this is the one for you....more
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