Enjoy this Monday with Mildred!
This is also a Zombie World Tour post!
Dead of Night
Jonathan Maberry has worked in zombies before, from an excellent YA series beginning with Rot & Ruin to the awesomely slam bang Joe Ledger series beginning with Patient Zero, and here he gives us his usual highly technical explanation for things that couldn’t ever really happen, i.e., zombies (in this case in the traditional small town Pennsylvania). His zombies in this series are a little different, beginning in chapter two, (Chapter One: “This is the way the world ends.” Really. That’s all of it.) and I won’t give away the why here, but it really weirded me out.
He builds the pace slowly, as befitting the genre, and it is very violent, as his books tend to be. Some people may appreciate the fact that the main hero is a woman cop, so I thought I’d throw that out. As is usual, though, the heroic woman must be completely messed up. Real basket case. No surprise there. The writing is solid, as we’ve come to expect from him, and it darn near surprised me at the end. Okay, not really 😉 EXCEPT for the last line which, though I knew what was going to happen STILL was really unnerving.
Because it’s zombies Maberry makes some deeply political statements, as befits the genre, especially close to the end. As the book is devoted to George Romero, this is not surprising.
I guess you might say I found the book entertaining, sometimes very engrossing (I was reading in the K-Mart parking lot at night when my S.O. pounded on the trunk of the car, needing to unload packages. Yes, I *did* drop the book and flutter my hands like a melodramatic 1920s actress. Then I laughed, but still…), and one that I would recommend to someone who enjoys a good zombie yarn, so long as they can get past blatant political speak (that I agreed with, but still found over-the-top) and the typical Damaged Goods Woman Hero.
LINKS:
Chick Flicking Reviews 