Written by Sanford Begley
Zombie Fallout-Mark Tufo. Big thumbs down
I don’t normally review a book I haven’t read in its entirety. Sometimes though, sometimes the fail is so big you must give fair warning. This story might get better later on. I doubt it. It starts out with Swine Flu mutating into something virulent, and gets more implausible from there. Seems the scientists rushed a vaccine without testing to see if it killed you and then turned you into a zombie. Now I will say that in emergencies things get rushed. I can even believe that scientists might unleash a virus that reanimated your corpse as a zombie. I don’t buy them rushing it to the point where the vaccine is more fatal than the disease. I’m also not buying H1N1 becoming that dangerous, but I have been wrong about such things.
Still you can forgive a little medical idiocy for the sake of story set up, well, maybe. It gets worse is the problem. You see, the writer was trying to write as someone who had lost his white collar job and was living as a blue collar worker. The writer obviously never worked blue collar in his life. So he starts by screaming BOOOOSH lost me my job. Not a good reason in the world to put that in except signaling to the rest of the hard leftists that he is one of them. Then he goes on and on about how he just wanted a shower because feeling the dirty collar on his neck was so icky. Not what I would consider germane to the story.
Ahh then in a paean to how much more horrible white collar life is to blue collar he rhapsodizes about how at least with a blue collar job there were no job worries when you went home. You know, blue collar workers, who build things people’s lives depend upon, never have nightmares about how badly their possible screwups could end.
Then he makes sure you know he considers his wife a shrew, while she calls him out before he gets clean to point out that the zombies are in the street. Oh and his son, the football player, big and destructive, hiding behind his mother whimpering. Ahh yes, big macho athletes always cower behind their mothers.
Then he sees the zombies and starts talking about how he had been looking forward to a good zombie apocalypse just like in his favorite movies and how he had a safe full of guns and had been prepping for the Z.A. for 39 years and had a safe full of guns and everything. He has had to move to a worse neighborhood because Bush and has bars on all the windows because the crime is so horrible, well all the windows except for the french doors in back. RIIIIGHT. Then he tells his son to check the back yard and the big macho athlete breaks down in tears. So he goes to check and realizes the back gate is open. The back gate is the only thing that will stop the zombies despite the safe full of guns. So he runs out still naked to shut the gate. At this point he says “If they came through the gate now, this was going to be a short novella”
At that point I quit reading. I’m sorry, you can only stomach so much idiocy per book, he exceeded that by leagues.
Now I admit to not being a zombie book fan, That doesn’t apply here. This is an idiot protagonist, at that he may be smarter than the author. I was reading this because someone recommended it to my wife. Since it was on a free promotion she decided to try it. I assumed that it had to be not too bad if it was recommended by someone not the author. We all know what happens when you assume anything. I’m hoping the wife can remember who suggested it. I want to make sure never to listen to them again. Final verdict? Negative stars
Comments
10 responses to “Curmudgeon Review: Zombie Fallout”
He dominates the top 100 in a “zombie” search on Amazon. Pretty popular.
I read a couple but his characters got a little wooden. He relies on the same tropes book after book for his character development. The only thing that moves along from book to book, is the zombie witch zombie master about which we learn one new fact each book.
I just ignored the ideological component, you get that a lot. Zombies are popular with the left, for some reason. The gun handling is usually fairly amusing in all of them.
Tufo does better than most. He’s a marine, I think.
If he is in the top thousand it says sad things about zombie books
I just looked. He has slipped some, only two in the top 100.
And yes, pretty abysmal genre altogether. Maybe 1 in 10 worth reading.
And I like zombie fic.
PS: I’m hoping mine will give them a little cognitive dissonance, If I can ever get it together.
I have to come down on Sanford’s side here. Urp.
Me, too.
What’s with the “too short comment” thing?
The too short comment is a quirk of the wordpress theme,
I think I need to change WP themes. Again. But it won’t be soon! Argh
I think they are all inadequate in some aspect to herd people toward buying one.
I gave up looking for a better one.
Because I have specific things I want in a theme, I wound up with one that was loading too slowly. This one is my compromise.