The series staggers on, but without adding anything new or interesting to the zombie genre.
In the second book in Moody’s Autumn series, a few dozen city dwellers try to survive after a mysterious plague wipes out almost everyone, then turns a third of the dead into shuffling zombies.
The first book in the series followed three survivors who fled the city to hole up in a farmhouse for a short time before it was overrun by the zombie horde. Two of the three—Michael and Emma—escaped, and the second book finds them living out of the back of a camper in the countryside. Meanwhile, survivors in a larger city gravitate in ones and twos toward a university complex where 40 or so other living folks are scratching out a meager existence. They are able to venture into the city for food and supplies for a time, but eventually, as the zombies become more aggressive and the crowd of shuffling dead outside the university swells to massive proportions, they realize they must take desperate steps to survive. Luckily, hope arrives in the form of Cooper, a soldier who has so far spent the zombie apocalypse holed up in an underground bunker with a few hundred other soldiers, and who thinks he may be able to find his way back. The first book in the series suffered mainly from the fact that anyone who had ever been exposed to the genre—so, essentially anyone reading the book—knew fairly early on that at some point the world was going to be full of relentless zombies, yet the story took too long to get there, without going anywhere particularly interesting in the meantime. Thankfully, the second installment corrects this problem by going full zombie early on. Unfortunately, there is an awful lot of zombie stuff out there, and Moody doesn’t really bring anything new. The author's Hater (Dog Blood, 2010, etc.) series, told from the point of view of his bloodthirsty, relentless and belligerent, but intelligent and aware Haters, is much better.
The series staggers on, but without adding anything new or interesting to the zombie genre.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-57000-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin’s Griffin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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