[As a complete opposite to our first The Last Mailman Review this one takes the opposite view.]
Kevin J. Burke’s The Last Mailman is a journey through postapocalyptic America in the search for a cure for zombism. Four years after the zombie apocalypse, DJ Haddox is a mailman–a man who travels out into the wild to bring closure to survivors, often bringing back letters or mementos from those they left behind. When news of a cure comes from Atlanta, he flies down to trade for it, and all hell breaks loose.
The Good:
Zombies eat people, and there aren’t many typos.
Other than that, sparks of good ideas pop up, such as a hermit who keeps zombie “cattle” to feed himself, but these are lost opportunities that are never turned into the creepy, horrific scenes they could have been. Even the interesting job of mailman is discarded after the prologue.
The Bad:
With two confusing exceptions, this story is told from the first-person viewpoint of DJ Haddox, whose blasé narration conveys no sense of urgency whatsoever, and this ho-hum nonchalance pervades every scene. The dialogue is wooden, and every character sounds the same. To whit, as a mother bites her son’s ear off it’s unlikely he’d say, “Ahhhhhhh! What are you doing, Mommy?” Nor would an observer reply, “Something’s wrong with your mother!”
The plot is a string of action sequences stitched together with bickering. As one example of more than a dozen situations where the plot stalls so that the characters can argue, they get in a car crash because their bickering distracts the driver, and upon airbag deployment they bicker about the crash even though zombies are closing in on their position–but not to worry, they’re rescued by people they then bicker with. I lost track of how many times a person, distracted by bickering, was tackled by a zombie.
Huge swaths of this story are unbelievable even in the context of a zombie novel. In a town of eight hundred people, a jealous husband is able to impersonate one of four guards on the most important mission ever dreamed of. DJ gets in a plane crash without a seatbelt and multiple car crashes without exhibiting the slightest discomfort. Burning zombies light live trees on fire just by trying to clamber up them. More than once, Stacey kills multiple charging zombies by shooting each in the eye with her crossbow, which apparently has unlimited ammo and no reload time.
The Ugly:
Mr. Burke’s portrayal of women would be hilarious if I didn’t know or didn’t like any women. For a book that contains little sex, it’s stunning just how sex-obsessed and sexist it is. Forget that fertile women are systemically-though-gently raped in order to repopulate the Earth. Forget, too, that this rationale doesn’t make sense. Heck, neither does the plot-driver where DJ is selling women into sex-slavery to pay for a cure for zombism, so forget that, too. What matters here isn’t that women are oppressed, it’s that even when free to choose their own path, women are good for absolutely nothing but screwing, screaming, and clinging to the menfolk who are busy saving them… and they like it that way.
When it’s newcomer Nadia’s turn to boink complete stranger DJ, she participates with unfeigned delight, even pulling him back into bed when he tries to leave. After the plane crash, the hot, almost featureless and completely interchangeable soon-to-be-slaves (who have at this point grumbled at their plight but no more) willingly and enthusiastically fall for and have sex with their guards. Beyond this, women do little more than shriek in terror and bicker. This galling, unbelievable enthusiasm for their own rapists is treated without a shred of irony.
In the wild, cult leader Simon takes all women on his property to be his brides, and they of course go along with it because that’s what women do. When not obsessing about or breastfeeding her children, even supreme zombie-hunter Stacey–the only woman in the novel with any notable skills–is completely subservient to Simon, as illustrated by her meek submission to unwanted anal sex… Until DJ intervenes, of course, because it’s obvious that a dead-shot martial artist killing machine couldn’t save herself without a man’s help.
Add in that Stacey of course is a bit of a nudist and Holly of course gives the boys a “fashion show” when they’re foraging for clothes and of course Elizabeth doesn’t like but goes along with sex trafficking because that’s the way the world is, and oh yeah, one final misogynistic slap in the face–in the final pages, it’s mentioned that new fertility advances might result in women’s rights making “a comeback”… After all of that what do you have?
The Verdict:
This may be, without exaggeration, the worst novel ever commercially published.
Available at Amazon
