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
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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