An endlessly entertaining zombie tale that checks off genre conventions with style.
In this horror romp, a woman’s love for her fiance survives the zombie apocalypse despite his status as one of the undead.
Twenty-one-year-old Rhonda Driscoll was a hairstylist just six months ago, before the Necro-Rabies breakout in North America. Rabid zombies, known as Cujos, devour living humans or turn them into the undead. Rhonda is one of 200 survivors at a military base run by her father and sole remaining family member, Col. Kenneth Driscoll. When the latest mission for gathering supplies and survivors includes her hometown of Levendale, she’s reluctant to join, as it’s where she watched her loved ones die. But it’s also a chance to revisit her home, where she surprisingly finds her husband-to-be, Brad Savini. He’s “Cujo-fied,” but rather than kill him, Rhonda secures Brad with a gag ball and a handy pair of furry handcuffs. The colonel isn’t happy when Rhonda brings a Cujo back to the base, and when it’s clear he’s planning to put Brad down, she flees with her undead fiance. With little knowledge of how the plague is affecting the rest of the world, she faces unknown dangers. Sure, there are other living humans out there, but they may not be preferable to rabid zombies. Wagner (The Armageddon Chord, 2011) merely hints at a global epidemic while ensuring the story is Rhonda-centric. This maintains a sharp, persistently moving narrative of the protagonist’s personal quandary and eventual flight. Rhonda’s questionable decisions (for example, leaving the base’s safety) are forgivable, as she’s protecting her soul mate, who, to be fair, is tamer than most Cujos. She’s moreover a laudable heroine, trained by the colonel. She uses her shooting skills to dispatch multiple zombies and cares for a couple of younger survivors. The narrative stays grounded in familiar zombie terrain, from an undead lover to humans proving worse than the flesh-eating Cujos. But it’s immensely fun, and Rhonda dishes out one-liners with panache, even if only in her head: “I ain’t got time to bleed.”
An endlessly entertaining zombie tale that checks off genre conventions with style.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62601-465-7
Page Count: 194
Publisher: Riverdale Avenue Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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