Rapture is an interesting foray for Mr. Sutton into the zombie/undead/horror/apocalyptic genre. The storyline revolves around several different characters ranging from a couple of comic book fanboys to a Hispanic family, a drunken vagrant and a National Guard unit. The reader follows along as each of these groups encounter zombies and in some cases, each other with mostly adverse results. Most of the action is focused on the Guard unit and the fanboys. Taking a page out of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, one group takes shelter in a ‘Megamart’ similar to the survivors in Romero’s film, who take shelter in a large mall. The National Guard unit turns out to be commanded by a captain that would make Brando’s Colonel Kurtz look like a humanitarian. While both these instances border on cliché, Sutton makes it work, sort of.
While the story has plenty of action, suspense and horror, it does suffer from a serious formatting issue where the previous chapters run into the next chapter with no warning as in no spacing between creating a run-on problem. Along with this problem are spelling, grammatical issues accuracy and research issues. What I found to be slightly confusing were the references to hippies, Vietnam, the older OD green uniforms that the Guard had, their use of the M16 rifle then toss in some references to contemporary pop culture like Bruce Campbell. This is an era/setting issue that could be resolved by some minor rewrites or editing.
Example of this can be seen when the Guard unit encounters a group in a Tan Ford truck which later morphs into a Jeep and the occupants are referred to as hippies and use the classic 70’s terminology by calling the soldiers ‘fascist pigs’. Previous to that, there was a description of the Guard’s weapons referencing the old M60s as ones that had seen action during Vietnam. This reference falls back a lack of research. What I mean is that while it is technically true that the National Guard is normally given hand me downs from Big Army, they would not still be using M60 machine guns that had seen action in Vietnam or be wearing the old and now retired, OD green ‘fatigues’. It’s possibly that the unit might have some older M16A2s in their inventory but not too likely as most Guard units have been deployed to SWA in the last 10 years and all of them should now have the M4 which started replacing the M16 in 1994.
Again, research, when you use real-world items in a fictional story, at least try to be as accurate as possible.
When the group that contains the fanboys hits a gun store they grab semi-automatic M16s, these would in reality be AR15s the semi-automatic only version of the M16 as the M16 is a selective fire weapon specifically reserved for military and police use. Therefore, AR15 would be more accurate in this instance, see research again. In a later sequence in the story, a Nation Guard corporal pulls his 9mm which as described, replaced the 50 caliber Desert Eagle that the military used to issue. I scratch my head at this one with a big WTF? At no time has any branch of the US Military ever issued the .50 IMI Desert Eagle handgun. They have replaced the 1911 .45, ‘old slabsides’ with the Beretta 92FS which is designated the M9.
This directly relates back to research, accuracy and those pesky little things called details.
Overall, Sutton has a good plot with somewhat developed characters. A bit more time spent with the spell checker on, some editing and a reformatting of the story to include spaces between the chapters and he has a good entry into the genre. I’d like to just add one more thing, what I call the 5 very basic rules to follow when writing a book.
1) Did you proof read your work?
2) Did you get it edited?
3) Can you honestly state that what you have is the best you can produce?
4) Did you do enough research?
5) Is there a good balance between plot and character?
I don’t profess to know everything there is to know about writing but these rules, passed onto me by a good friend who is a published author, are something to consider before rushing out and putting your work into print. After all, you did take the time and effort to do the work, now take the time and effort to make it all worthwhile for your fans.
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