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ZOMBIES VERSUS THE ANTICHRIST

Name: ZOMBIES VERSUS THE ANTICHRIST
Author: David Peter Ehrlich
ISBN: 978-1500317720

THE WALKING DEAD AGAINST THE ANTICHRIST

by David Peter Ehrlich ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 31, 2014

A somewhat unexciting supernatural tale, hampered by awkward prose.

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Ehrlich (World War Four and the Catholic Empire, 2014, etc.) returns with a novel about the end of the world, in which demons clash and humans face danger from all corners.

As this long novel begins, Karl Laforce of the City Defense Forces is going back to college by train, leaving the big city behind him. Another student explains that this unnamed university is the right place if Karl is looking for “a new resurrection from the toil of life.” He and other characters adhere to the politics of National Socialism, and often talk about the Reich, the importance of the “Volk” and the dangers of Asiatic Bolshevism. But it turns out that there are far greater threats in world. Not only is this “pristine countryside” targeted by some of the same criminal forces that terrorize other parts of the country, but there are also other, darker forces at work in the surrounding forest. Two demons are fighting a war on Earth: One is Merihem, who creates zombies, and the other is Abaddon, who’s said to be one of several Antichrists. It comes as no surprise that the demonic zombies soon become a problem for Karl, as well. This could have been the start of an engaging adventure story, but readers may have a hard time connecting with the characters here, who mostly speak in odd, stilted prose: “As the pure white Swan of Lohengrin is everlasting and eternal in the cadence of our hearts music so I shall faithful be unto you.” There’s also plenty of distracting technical specifications for guns, binoculars and other equipment. Overall, the setting is vague and dreamlike: The pub near the university, for instance, is called the “University Pub,” and its proprietor is “the Publican.” Readers familiar with World War II history may find some character names of interest, as several of them belong to Nazis who died in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. (The book is also dedicated to several real-life Nazis, such as SS member Col. Jakob Grimminger.) However, the novel’s many odd aspects never come together to create a unified effect.

A somewhat unexciting supernatural tale, hampered by awkward prose.

Pub Date: July 31, 2014

ISBN: 978-1500317720

Page Count: 374

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2014

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
WORLD WAR FOUR and the CATHOLIC EMPIRE
by David Peter Ehrlich

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SIEGE OF KHE SANH 1967-68
by David Peter Ehrlich

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER
by Harper Lee ; edited by Casey Cep

- BOOK REVIEW
GO SET A WATCHMAN
by Harper Lee

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.