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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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