LZR-1143 by Bryan James introduces us to Mike a one-time Hollywood action hero who was a serious box office draw. Mike has been accused of killing his wife but has no memory of doing so. This places him in a mental institution instead of prison but that’s not always a good thing. He’s essentially remanded to his cell where he’s heavily sedated for fear that somehow; he could become violent with possible repressed violent schizophrenic tendencies.
Waking up one morning, he finds himself in the TV room with no supervision, no escorts and no morning dose of anti-psychotics. Not that he needed the medication to begin with but I’ll get into that later. Meanwhile, the world outside the walls of the facility has changed into a land of the walking dead.
It takes some time for Mike to come out of his nightly dose of meds to realize that the dead have been reanimated and some are inside with him, wandering the halls seeking fresh victims. After initial contact with one, he escapes unbitten and is able to meet up with a few other fellow survivors. These survivors consist of Kate, one of the doctors and a few patients. One particular patient, Fred, is blessed with a one word vocabulary, ‘pancake’ which adds to some of the dark humor throughout the story.
The story moves on from the asylum as they escape, run into more infected, a bad cop, a Target store night manager and of course, several thousand infected all while dragging along a couple of mental patients.
As the storyline progresses, the reader, as well as the primary character, Mike, are shown flashbacks to Mike’s life prior to incarceration. This lends a nice spin to the plot as Mr. James beautifully incorporates it into the current flow of the story instead of sidetracking the reader with paragraphs or chapters that move away from the core of the tale.
Mike slowly and eventually gets his memory back of what happened the night he allegedly killed his wife and the truth is shocking. While I began to suspect there was another reason for the murder and then started to put the pieces together as I read, some of it didn’t make too much sense until the ending chapters where it was all explained.
Or was it?
While the cause for the infection was explained and the reason behind his wife’s murder which he was wrongly accused of are all laid out, the ending makes the reader sit back and wonder if what they read really happened or was it a hallucinogenic reaction to the medication that was administered to Mike and the entire course of events only occurred in his drug addled mind.
I have to say that Mr. James has written one of the better novels in this genre to come my way in a long time. He successfully combined a murder mystery, political intrigue, industrial espionage and cover-up into a zombie/apocalyptic/horror genre novel and made it work.
I’m very much looking forward to the next book in this series.
Available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
