Dead Tropics by Sue Edge is what I imagine many self-published books are like. It’s surprisingly good, but despite its quality, is still in need of a good professional editor. (Not that, as a professional editor myself, I have any bias in the matter.) But you’re probably not as interested in the various grammatical foibles of the story as I am, so let’s move on to the meat of the book.
Dead Tropics takes place on an island that I believe is a part of Australia. (So if you’re American, expect a couple of unfamiliar spellings.) Lori Nelson is a nurse, wife, mother, and secret badass. Not even she realizes just how awesome she is… until one day when a local mine delves too deep and too greedily, and unleashes an ancient evil of shadow and flame… Err… Sorry, wrong book. No, in Dead Tropics a local mine does dig too deep and it unleashes a virus. Or perhaps a terrible vengeance wrought upon mankind by the mother earth for its hubris. The book is a little unclear. Anyway… Most of the miners contract this virus and they get deathly ill. So, of course they’re taken to hospitals for treatment and… well… I think you can see where this is going. Lori sees the virus spread, almost from the start, as she sees miners die and then get up and start biting people in the hospital she works at. The bitten people in turn start doing the same. She just barely manages to escape with several co-workers she’d never met before and a little girl they manage to rescue from the pediatric ward. They make a break for it, however, the growing zombie horde is implacable, and every time the protagonists reach a safe spot, the zombies catch up and they have to move again.
It’s not the most original of set-ups for the genre, I’ll grant you that. In fact, a lot of the book almost seems like a checklist of various zombie tropes and stereotypes that had to be included to “count†as a zombie novel. Dead Tropics really isn’t trying to break new ground here as far as that goes. Heck, there’s even a brief scene at a mall. But, you know what? That’s just fine, because as you read the book you get the feeling that Edge is telling the story that she wants to tell, and she tells it well enough.
I say “well enough†because a lot of the book is, to my mind, rather awkwardly worded. There’s really not much that’s grammatically incorrect, it’s mostly a matter of preference and that I would have worded things differently, had I been the one writing the book. Granted, there are some phrases she uses that are strange no matter where you’re from, (such as the zombie that “clenches it’s hands into claws,†which I don’t know how that would even be possible,) but s are few and far between. Really, my biggest complaint is that, aside from Lori, all of the characters in the book seem interchangeable. They all talk in the same way, they almost all react to situations in the same way, and they all have the same impact on you – which is very little. When a minor character was talking, I had to keep reminding myself of who they were and what they relationship to the protagonist was. That made it a little difficult to empathize with them when they died. In fact, I felt a lot more of a connection to a lot of the characters who showed up just long enough to die.
Overall, however, the book has a lot more going for it than it has going against it. The protagonist has the lion’s share of screen time in the book, which softens the blow of the lackluster minor characters, there’s plenty of gore (if you’re into that sort of thing) and the books reads at a pretty quick pace. Heck, I almost felt the need to take a breather a couple times since the action almost never lets up. Even the slower scenes where the characters are planning their next move from a safe location feel fast. It was like running a marathon in book form. Whether that’s a positive thing or a negative thing probably varies from person to person, but at the very least, you won’t get bored reading this book. Plus, this book answers the eternal question that has plagued zombie fans for generations: Can a zombie beat a crocodile? (Sorry, you’ve got to read the book to find out.)
One other interesting part of the book that’s neither here nor there, but I felt was noteworthy, is that Edge is a mother, and it really, really shows up in this book. While zombie apocalypse fiction has never shied away from killing off children, Edge practically fixates on it. Don’t get me wrong, she’s not killing off kids for kicks; it’s presented as horror, and the parts where children are being killed or in danger of such are probably the most horrific parts of the book. As a parent myself, I would say that they are easily the most horrific and terrifying parts of the book. However, I can’t say if non-parents will see things in the same light. Still, I for one can see where she’s coming from. She set out to write a scary horror novel, and so she wrote in a lot of what, to her and most parents, would be the most terrifying thing imaginable. And it worked.
Bottom Line: Dead Tropics is a solid book, and if you’re looking for a book to read, this one is worth your time and money. You can find it at its website, deadtropics.com or Amazon
