Eugene Cusie has put together an interesting story about a zombie outbreak that also takes when there is an attempted prison break. At first it might seem that the two events were related due to the timing but as the novel plods on that becomes questionable.
Eugene took a few great ideas that could have created an amazing novel though it had a few failings that prevented it from this being a complete rave review.
The first area that there is going to be an issue is the large number of characters for the length of the book. While the plot all revolves around a prison and those who are at it or near it there are so many it’s hard to really focus on one story line with how much it jumps around.
I like mini-anthology novels that are put together with multiple points of views. Timothy Long’s work shows this is a solid writing choice but there are just TOO many to follow here in the limited space that the author has to work in.
We have a group of police and guards trying to prevent the riot. They are a good read as they are doing the right thing and don’t suffer from any real internal problems. We have a group of citizens we’re following that has it’s own interesting set of two survivalists who own their own respective businesses. This is more of a mix of characters and while I can’t stand one of them it’s a solid group and also fun to read about. There is a group of paramedics who are just trying to find a place that’s safe and seem to have the worst luck. Finally there is a small group of guards who break a couple of prisoners out because they want to ready for taking over now that the world has gone to hell and start their own little dictatorship.
The point of view of the ‘leader’ of this last group really is just so absurd and out of base that when it started showing the world through his eyes I almost had to stop reading. I understand the want for such a character and long term if he had developed into that category it could have been a winning combination. The problem was that when the zombies started to walk his mind just flipped like a switch to being this person.
There was no real information that this was a world wide problem and until even slightly after this it was still contained to a small area. Yet there he was, breaking out prisoners to start his own little army.
If this had taken longer to develop I would have been fine with it but it was such a blatant want for a bad guy that it felt forced.
Pushing past that though this is looking to be setup as a series. If he calms down on the rapid character changes moving on I really could see this being interesting. The writing isn’t bad by any means and while there were a couple mistakes here or there with the editing I could see this turning into something good.
With so many great zombie novels out right now this wouldn’t be on the top of my list to recommend. If you do read a LOT of the undead though this might have enough interesting twists to keep you interested.
Available at Amazon.
