What’s Deadrise About
At the dawn of the 21’st century a mysterious plague sweeps the globe, causing the recently deceased to return to life as flesh eating zombies! With civilization collapsing around them, and facing dangers from both the living and the dead, a group of survivors band together and attempt to escape the city. Besieged on all sides by zombies and madmen, will they be able to survive the DEADRISE?
Our Deadrise Review
I’m honestly not sure where to even start with this novel. There is so much good and creativity within it’s pages mixed with so many flaws that it was difficult to finish.
So the novel itself starts off in your standard zombie apocalypse. People have become desperate and don’t know what is happening. In fact the government has successfully been able to keep a lid on things to the point where people think there is a plague they are avoiding and not trying to escape from the flesh eating reanimated corpses of their friends, relatives, and neighbors. In fact even while parts of the country are being overrun the surviving portions of the government are able to keep order in the face of chaos through pure lies and military force.
That is until they couldn’t anymore. With the military stretched so thin in the remaining surviving areas that what is left of the military and the United States is shrinking before the onslaught of this plague and what little we find out is that most of the rest of the world is fairing no better. Finally things break down into chaos and we follow our main characters on a road trip to a lake house that they believe they’ll be able ot ride out the plague at safely.
When they first come face to face with the undead they are unsure what to do but quickly realize that the only way to survive is to take out the infected. The only way to do that is your classic aim for the head.
About half way through the novel we find out though that this zombie plague isn’t what it seems as our heroes meet up with other survivors and come face to rotten face with Super Zombies. These zombies are able to run, use guns, and seem to have the sole purpose of wanting to kill off all of humanity.
If that’s not bad enough just wait until you find out what is controlling the zombies AND super zombies.
Honestly I will completely give Steven Gardner credit for coming up with an amazingly well put together world. Even with editorial errors infecting every page, an overuse of their term for zombie, the fact that everyone in the book seems to be a natural marksmen, and the annoying overkill of bad traits one of the big bad guys near the end seems to suffer from – the book was interesting. I’ve never given up on a book that was hard to read due to errors but I honestly think if Steven gets a solid editor and re-releases that this could be one of the better zombie books to hit the scene in years from a creative stand point alone.
If you are looking for an original take on the zombie genre there are a lot of original ideas in here. When I could get into the flow and overlook the mistakes and over the top unbelievability of the characters marksmenship and dumb luck it was an absolutely fun read. Will I pickup the sequel? It is extremely likely that I will because I do want to know what happens. Will I put this at the top of my recommendations list? I can’t in good faith say that I would.
