Like many impressive zombie narratives, this tale wrestles with humans’ deeper connection to the undead.
This horror novel sees a trio of friends embark on a road trip during a zombie apocalypse.
In Tucson, Arizona, Desré Dupuy is an Air Force veteran in love with Blake Edwards, a musicology student. Blake’s best friend, Granville Preston Gordon, is a former Navy MP, and together they form the Trio de Dio. They share a weekly movie night featuring zombie flicks. Though Gran asserts that “all of life is in those movies,” Des is sick of the cheesy Hollywood productions. She convinces her friends to celebrate the birthday of Marie Laveaux, a 19th-century Condomblé priestess and Acadian heroine. They create an altar, burn their troubles (like Blake’s eviction notice) in an abalone shell, and dance to banda music. Despite being enlightened, Gran insists that a zombie apocalypse is near because he dreamed it—and his dreams always come true. The next morning, a horrible stench assaults the Trio. Outside the crummy apartment complex, the dead have indeed risen. So begins the Trio’s journey, taking them through Texas and Louisiana and toward Des’ relatives in South Carolina, who live on the “Fish-Camp” reservation. Along the way, natural disasters strike and new friends pop up. In this series opener, Curaçao (Walker, 2018), Edwards (Strange Diary Days, 2018), and debut author Kalkwarf enter the well-trod genre with narrative guns blazing. They give longtime fans exactly what they crave with descriptions like “part of her face was gone, blown away, from the looks of it,” and “all her internal organs were missing. It was just a body cavity…spine showing through.” The overall tone is light, sharpened with self-awareness, as in the line “A fire axe, just waiting there for me like it had been drawn in by some supernatural narrator.” Sometimes the tendency to tell rather than show infects the proceedings, as with a rant about Des’ awful neighbor, Dino. But the theme that family is important—and that all humans are related—is an excellent one. The notion that zombies represent a modern-day Ragnarok, humanity’s natural end, is as captivating as it is terrifying.
Like many impressive zombie narratives, this tale wrestles with humans’ deeper connection to the undead.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5255-4540-5
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Bothsams Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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