Zombies and alien fiends attack in force in this Michael Bay–style actioner.
A small-town sheriff is the first to discover the incredible truth behind a zombie plague in Chatman’s debut horror novel.
In Ghostwood, West Virginia, widowed Navy SEAL–turned-sheriff Thomas Pratt is distracted from his difficulty parenting his teenage son and daughter by a more urgent crisis. People are being bitten by grotesque, antlike insects and quickly turning into “Spewers”—superstrong and superfast undead who vomit more bugs and spread the contagion. They can be destroyed, though—mainly with gunshots to the head. (Oddly, no one uses the Z-word to describe the infected.) Within days, society collapses as the plague reaches Washington, D.C., but battle-hardened Thomas and other select, die-hard Ghostwood citizens persist—along with savvy street-gang members, military holdouts, and survivalists. Readers are tipped off from the start that a cabal of scientists is behind the coordinated onslaught of insects and infected humans—and when Thomas actually meets the conspirators, they’re revealed to have highly unusual origins. The author doles out numerous scenes of gruesome violence, including torture. However, he stops short of the grindhouse-level gore that one often sees in the zombie subgenre (no chainsaw-wielding cheerleaders here). Indeed, characters reverently invoke God and eschew profane language in favor of soldierly lingo: “We will infiltrate at first light to reduce the chances of enemy contact due to the deadly effect the sun has on them. Two teams, Alpha and Bravo team.” Still, an infusion of sci-fi villainy shifts this material from a tense, straightforward George A. Romero–style tone into comic-book territory, with superbeings laying smack downs on one another amid heroic and vainglorious firefights. The finale is sequel-friendly, indeed. (Not to be confused with 2013’s The Spread, a different zombie-themed novel by Michelle Kilmer and Rebecca Hansen.)
Zombies and alien fiends attack in force in this Michael Bay–style actioner.Pub Date: April 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64214-161-0
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
