The First Days - It's the end of the world and I hate them all.

The book up this time is, “The First Days” by Rhiannon Frater. The woman at a local bookstore had suggested I read and review this book. Back in February. It wasn’t as painfully bad as another book that will be coming soon, but it was bad. Since this is a new blog, I’ll say it now, spoilers are ahead and if you do want to read this book despite my distaste for the writing, you’ll want to stop before the warning. The book itself is a poorly edited mess with poor characters, jumbled scenes and unlikeable characters with a swath of mental issues more likely attributable to bad writing than any real issues. There are a few moments in the book where it was actually strong, but far too often I just… didn’t want to go on.
THAR BE SPOILERS
So we’ll start with the definitive best part of the book, it’s first couple of pages. I was legitimately excited when I first picked this book up and started reading. It hit just the right mixture of chaotic horror and shock that should be mandatory for writing in this genre. Unfortunately, it quickly nosedives from there. We’re talking within ten pages. She throws a rush of scenes at the reader that would work well in a movie to show the chaos, something like the Dawn of the Dead remake, but here it just feels off. They then start arguing about whether or not to call the zombies, well, zombies. It was such an abrupt change I actually rolled back a few pages to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. I then had to make sure I was reading about Jenni and Katie and not about Shaun and Ed. Whiplash back again in time to find a survivor who is promptly killed, then a quick drive from the city to rural erh… Texas supposedly. It was a bit jarring being able to go twenty minutes without running a Twisted Metal game through Suburbia, but I haven’t seen enough of Texas to know just how accurate it is. It annoys me though.
They arrive at a gas station and exit with their guns. There’s only the kid and… maybe his girlfriend? She sort of pops up and disappears as the plot calls for. The kid thinks they’re robbing him even though they’re paying. He even tells them they’re robbing him wrong and that they’re crazy for talking about the zompocalypse. Of course, he doesn’t have a TV or Radio because the owner has standards or some other utterly bullshit reason. Would’ve at least made more sense to say “Hey man, our radio’s out the signal’s weird” or something. Then a family shows up, then disappears. They added nothing and did nothing, but they were mentioned. Matter of fact in writing this, I probably have doubled the section they were present for. No I don’t know why or who they were either. Then the owner shows up eating the girl, or shows up and eats the girl or the girl runs into him. They watch the owner then chase the kid around the store while glibly remarking,
“I warned him.”
“Yep”
“Coffee?”
before driving off. I’ll be honest I don’t remember or care which of the two said it, it was bad. These are supposed to be two strong, realistic female protagonists. They read like the sociopaths from a Glen Cook book. Admittedly watching Soulcatcher and Moonbiter blow up zombies would probably make a pretty good book. They drive on, find a small town with a gun store that used to be a prison that also doubles as a house stationed by an old hunter and his Israeli sniper wife. The store was called Toombs. Yes that thudding is in fact, my head hitting my desk. They stay there a few days, become master marksmen able to reliably make zombies heads’ explode like they’re in a Resident Evil game using the shotgun.She did have a few colorful euphemisms for exploding heads though.
They then leave Toombs and head for the summer camp Jenni’s kid (I hope..), leaving behind their spare gas after stepping on an 11 month old zombie child’s head. Oh and there’s references to tender baby flesh later. I hate this book.
They drive through a city on the way there. The only purpose of this scene was to show a school turned into a charnel house of dead adults and children. Oh and for a plot point later that puts Max Brooks misunderstanding of the human body and how things affect it to shame. (Ed - I like the Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z for what it’s worth)They arrive at the camp, run over a little girl zombie and arrive to a scene of two boys, a girl and two adults holed up in a room with zombies on the other side of a door. The father and daughter are bitten and one of our twoclichesheroes kills the father and the woman accidentally kill her daughter in a scream of rage. They run back to their truck since she’s drawing aggro on the mobs and she’s trying to train the zeds to them. They shoot the boy, escape with the other two boys and I think a girl, but only one of the boys is actually mentioned ever again so I’m not entirely sure. They start driving back, find out they’re bingo on fuel and reroute to a city where they find survivors holed up in a construction yard with jury-rigged fences and walls in a semblance of intelligence and improvisation. Then we meetlesbian Mary SueKatie’s love interest outside of Jenni. So the lesbian that converted a straight woman to semi-lesbian earlier on is suddenly bisexual and aiming for the guy that seemed perfect or some other drek.
They hang out for a bit, eat food claiming starvation while having ignored the BOX of MREs in the truck. They dick around for a bit, vaguely get to know the auxiliary carboard cutouts characters. They drive back to Toombs, Katie gets super sick for some drama/potential zombification. It was the flu. It made her suddenly super sick and pass out in the span of a few hours. Yes it was as stupid in the book as it sounds here. They round up guns and supplies, drive back, then dick around killing zombies some more. I did like the idea of using a crane with shipping crates to squish them though, they should’ve done that more.
A pair of meth addicts show up on a bike being chased by zombies from the clinic because they’d tried to raid it. One guy is executed in the defense because his fingers were bitten off. Because they grabbed his boot through the chain link. Yes it’s as dumb as I’m making it sound. That may have happened earlier though, I’m a bit… hazy on the ending as my eyes glazed over towards the end in a desperate bid to finish the book. The meth head is tossed over to be fed to the zombies while bound and gagged in the night, two characters most liable have alibis and the book promptly ends after we find out the Israeli sniper’s husband was shot by bandits who had raped a zombified woman or… pre-zombified or something.
The characters were paper thin and bordered heavily on unlikeable for a good portion of the book. The threats were credible enough in the running zombies, especially since they were also the swarming rotting variant. They apparently no longer had to worry about muscles tearing themselves apart from use anymore though as they could run after and catch up to moving trucks, back and forth. I think they’re the same magic zombies that made 28 Weeks Later even dumber than the “Hide from napalm in a tunnel and use your shirts to stop nerve gas” issue. Throughout the book they repeatedly reference Romero despite the differences in zombies all while ignoring Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later and the Dawn remake. They’re snarky and would’ve been enjoyable if they didn’t rotate between callous and sociopathic to geeks at a horror con. The dog kept smiling. The son, who the first book was dedicated to finding has one word lines for most of the rest of the book barring exceedingly short chapters where he’s a plot macguffin. He had only a few traits. “No, fuck YOU dad!”, “Don’t try to replace dad”, “I’m hungry” and long hair. Seriously. I really don’t remember much about the love interests other than them being construction worker and one of them being Mexican and calling Jenni loco.
Every once in a while throughout the book there were glimpses of well thought out scenes, but these were few and far between and interceded with pants on head stupid scenes otherwise. The pace meandered along well enough I guess, though it’s a little hard to judge since I couldn’t really stay focused on the plot well enough to really care. And that’s where the book really suffers. It’s characters are bad. They’re supposed to be strong female characters reminiscent of Thelma and Louise, but they’re such unlikeable Mary Sues that it suffers. All of the male characters be cardboard cutout in terms of writing certainly didn’t help matters either. It gets worse knowing that strong female characters CAN be done well. Murphy from the Dresden Files, The Lady, Soulcatcher, Darling, Sleepy all from The Black Company. Tinnie Tate, Maya and the Stormwarden from Garrett PI. Briar Blue from Boneshaker in the same ballpark genre. They all have strengths, weaknesses, flaws and you know, actual characterization.
The book also didn’t know when to leave things up to the reader’s imagination and when to give the full details. There was a dropped plot point involving semi-intelligent zeds that literally went nowhere and various other problems. Supposedly the book was self-published, but my copy is a Tor book and has apparently won awards from people with no taste or no exposure to other books in ANY genre.
I’ll rate it 3/10 only because there were a few points that were actually very good. If someone’s read the second book in the series and can confirm better writing I might give it a chance in the off chance that she’ll have learned from the mistakes of the first book.
With that said, the next book queued up WAS self published and features a self-insert Gary Stu fighting FEMA, the Military and zombies while acting as the touch of death to women he screws. Tune in next time for Down the Road by Bowie Ibarra.

Down the Road - Just keep walking, seriously.

Alternate title - Zombies cribbing notes from Family Guy.

Today's book is Bowie Ibarra's Down the Road. The zombies of the book are your typical crawlers. The slow sort that Savini poked fun at in his remake of Night of the Living Dead. You know, where the main character walks up and taunts one before just walking past them? Yeah..

That's fine though. The real threats of the books are actually FEMA and the military and it's done with all the subtlety of James Cameron writing the script to a Feed movie. I want this guy's .38 revolver though, it will decapitate people with ease. Yes really. And our main character George Zaragosa is in the same vein as The First Days. He's unlikeable and at this point he's cruel, though the people he's taking it out on aren't any better. X-Com's renamed soldiers have more personality and likeability than anyone we've met so far and I tended to shoot anything not wearing an X-Com uniform on the zombie missions. Yes, I feel worse losing a blob of pixels from a game made in 95 to anything I've met in the book. This one was hard guys. The blurb on the cover says, "Shocking and disturbing... This is pulp zombie fiction at it's best" which... tells me either the guy's got not taste or doesn't read much. Sandman Slim's Kill the Dead was much more enjoyable and it's much closer to 'pulp' than this book and World War Z for all of it's logic gaps, was also much, much more enjoyable.

I've mentioned this one was painful right? I forced my way through feed. This one is making me contemplate digging out a zippo. Jesus the book is only 200 pages and I'm struggling. And now it's the Illuminati and this ex-military guy just so happens to have the full story. All the cliches are out in full force.

So. The book opens with our teacher talking about the rapidly declining situation. He talks about his shitty apartment, then rambles about the shitty state of things, then his apartment, then things, then he decides to leave. He becomes surprised by the sudden burst of speed from a shambler, then drives off. On the highway, cops have set up a roadblock and are ticketing people and pulling them off the road if they can't pay. Realistically this scene would work better if it were the officers were trying to maintain order instead of just gouging for money, but we'll let this first one slide. Our 'hero' plows into them, killing one and severely hurting the other before driving off. He turns around after a while, having forgotten his dead fiancee's crucifix at the school. For something this important that he drives back into a zed hotzone, you think it would've at least been at his house.. He runs into a fellow teacher, they screw after a brief scuffle with zombies and then he's gone again with her in the passenger seat. They get to a gas station, meet more disposable goons who talk about pricks from a different fraternity, then FEMA attacks (Yes really) and the other teacher is gone. He escapes, is mugged by the other fraternity and kills two of them, then knee-caps the other two and laughs as they're eaten. (Yes really) He's picked up by FEMA and the Military and they're the typical zombie setting badguys. They mark him as "A red square" and he's tossed into the camp. The camp is set up in four groups, group 1 of the tough guys, 2 of the black guys, 3 of the rednecks or.. something and 4 for the 'spics' as the book so eloquently put it.

Here he finds out that they toss redsquares out over the wall as bait to save money and that things in the camp are horrible. He pisses off a redneck wearing a rebel flag shirt (Yes really) and then pisses off the Mexicans and starts a gangwar that lets him escape. With two disposable meats and a girl, he escapes by shooting soldiers and doing things like intentionally wounding to let zombies kill them instead. The boy and the redneck are eaten of course, leaving him and the girl. They meet up with a group, shoot up a military checkpoint, then go home. At home they meet the one-eyed guy from an earlier flashback that he couldn't possibly have had since he wasn't there, then he screws the new girl too. Then he screws the new girl. Then he dreams about screwing the new girl. Then they get talking and find out the eye-patch man is eeeeviiiil and kidnaps Misty to... do something to George who he barely knows as more than the fiancee of a woman he killed. She's tossed over a wall, breaking her elbow and ankle before she's eaten. Then a deus ex machina kills his guys, a muddled fight breaks out and the badguy is knee capped and eaten as well. They escape, then the guy that was bitten earlier coughs on a convenient scratch on George's hand, he drives home as he becomes slowly infected, eats a bunny that wandered up to him, makes it home and has his head blown off by his dad.

If this review sounded hurried, keep in mind this book was actually less than 200 pages. It jumped around, featured wholly unlikeable characters and as it went on just further aggravated me. Much like feed, I enjoyed his downfall, turning into a zombie, it was actually the closest to creepy that the book got. Unfortunately, to get there it was so contrived, so contrite and had happened to such an unlikeable man that I was just glad it was over. As a whole, authority figures were all evil, military was evil, cops, evil, drug dealers... well obviously evil, but presented better than the military in a very bizarre manner. The ending, the non-zombie part was unsatisfying and sort of read like a cliche checklist almost. All in all, I'd put this book on par with Feed in terms of writing, but with a less well designed world.

With that said, I think this book would've benefited greatly from just having more pages. Establishing the characters and settings better while also offering fewer jarring changes between scenes. Adding at least /some/ variation to the "EEEEVIIIIL" badguys would've been nice. I about threw the book across the room when the book (only slightly paraphrased) combined military insertions, explosions and gunfire with FEMA broadcasting, "You are not under attack, we are here to help. Resistance will result in neutralization". I think some stronger characterization in general would've helped, especially for George. The characters rotated out too much, there was too much emphasis on him humping the random dead girl and as I mentioned a few times, it really did read like a cliche checklist a few times. Hopefully if/when the author goes at it again, he writes a longer book and focuses more on the characters, or at least balances things better.

1.5/5

Also, I realized towards the end of this that this is the second zombie book with a main character named George. This needs to stop. Now. I nominate Shaun.