Could it be? Is this really a zombie novel with two bad ass heroines kicking butt and taking names? Oh. No. It isn't.
I'll give Frater credit where cre...moreCould it be? Is this really a zombie novel with two bad ass heroines kicking butt and taking names? Oh. No. It isn't.
I'll give Frater credit where credit is due: this story starts off like a really awesome slap in the face. We're introduced to Jenni, who is staring at the tiny baby fingers of her toddler son reaching under a crack in her door. Why? Because her abusive and zombified husband is having him for a snack. Her other son has been bitten by her husband, too, and is trying to claw out of the house via the window to take a chunk out of mommy. Jenni is only saved when Lesbian Katie (more on this in a minute) rolls up and gets her into the truck before she becomes zombie lunchmeat. Then, I'm afraid, begins the agonizing spiral into What The Shit Is This Land.
Here are the problems with this book:
- Characterization:
Jenni, you suck. After Jenni is rescued and she and Katie find a place to hole up for a while, she offers herself up to Lesbian Katie. I get it in a way. Coming from an abusive household, one might safely assume that Jenni has been brainwashed into thinking that she's nothing but a puppet for the needs of other people. Since Katie is the one that rescued her, it might be logical for Jenni to assume that sex is the price for safety and protection, making it really easy to not see this situation for what it is, which is just the first in a long line of scenarios in which Jenni thinks with her netherparts instead of her brain. Jenni's all-consuming goal of getting laid is so overwhelming for her that she forgets that she has a stepson that she needs to rescue (which, if I'm being honest, feels like just an impetus for Frater to insert a fancy action sequence into her story because her stepson is basically pointless after his rescue) and that she's lost her two sons less than a week prior. In short: abort, abort, abort.
Katie, you don't suck as much as Jenni. You're Diet Suck. I have dubbed Katie Lesbian Katie because ninety percent of the narrative about her is about her sexuality. In fact, the parts about her read less like a zombie novel and more like shitty dialogue in a Lifetime movie about gay acceptance. No, really, it gets so bad that Lesbian Katie goes out of her way to have a completely inappropriate and, frankly, pointless conversation about her sexuality with Jenni's adolescent stepson. She entrusted a fifteen year old the secret of her bisexuality; the whole bit felt more like an unnecessary scene for Frater to explain Katie's blossoming attraction with a man, when, if it had been kept out of the book, the story would not have been lacking.
Also, Frater's dudes sound like ladies. You know how annoying Bella Swan was in Twilight mooning over Edward? That was basically every male character in this book.
- Story:
One thing that Frater did really well was make sure that there was a lot of action. I liked that part about her writing because with the limited wriggle room available with zombie lore, stories can become dull or repetitive, which makes interpersonal relationships between characters necessary. Here is the problem. Much of the story focused on a stupid love quadrangle - Jenni loves cock (Travis', first), Travis loves Lesbian Katie, Juan loves Jenni, Katie wants to mourn her undead wife in peace - which was given far more importance than it should have. I was much more intrigued with the politics of the little community that Jenni and Katie found themselves in instead of a dumb game of elementary school Love Connection.
- General issues:
Every single character says, "Gawd" instead of "God". So it was pages of, "Oh my Gawd," and "Gawd, that's terrible," from every single character. I realize that this was a stylistic choice by Frater, but it made me want to punch puppies when every single character started to sound like an unintelligent Scarlett O'Hara.
It was super cute when Juan gave Jenni the nickname Loca. It stopped being cute around the four hundredth time he went out of his way to call her Loca. It made me wonder if Frater has ever had a conversation with a real person because every single sentence was peppered with her name, unnecessarily. Things he actually said: "You're loca, Loca." Shut up. The only redeeming quality about Juan is that I couldn't unsee him as Kevin Alejandro in my head:
Execution of the story in general was pretty bad. I had comprehension problems with the way Frater described things, but I didn't expect so much when I realized this book was a self-published deal. And it's no wonder. Gawd.(less)
I was talking to someone the other day about Author Blindness, which is a serious problem which plagues the best of us, or at least me. I have had Aut...moreI was talking to someone the other day about Author Blindness, which is a serious problem which plagues the best of us, or at least me. I have had Author Blindness with John Green. The day I finished reading Paper Towns, I went out and bought every other published work of his including the usual suspects - An Abundance of Katherines and Looking for Alaska - but also stuff like Will Grayson, Will Grayson, Let It Snow, and Geektastic. I consumed everything and I was so in love with his writing and his voice that I failed to see a lot of the flaws in it. At some point recently, I lost my awesome-goggles and upon rereading his story in Let It Snow and Geektastic, I was able to objectively review them.
The reason why I'm telling you all this is because I want you to believe me when I say that this story is pretty amazing.
Zombicorns is free, now, but I originally donated twenty-five dollars so that I could get the story. I know, you're thinking that twenty-five bucks is a pretty steep price for a novella, but I donated for the charity. John's novella was a bonus. John originally read the first page of this in a youtube video. I watched and I didn't get it, mainly because he used the word corn so much that corn didn't sound like a word anymore. So, despite the video, I donated and I got Zombicorns.
What's awesome about Zombicorns is that it combines two of my favorite things: John Green and zombies. If you've read John Green at all, you know he relies on a rather formulaic plot of a geeky, socially-inept guy and a quirky, buckets-of-awesome girl kind of colliding. This has essentially been the plot in everything that he's ever written; whenever he seems to stray from that maxim, he fails (see his shorts in Let It Snow and Geektastic). That said, I think I put off reading this novella because I simply assumed that it was going to suck. I was wrong.
Zombicorns is a story set in a world where a virus is spread by - yep, you guessed it - corn. I can appreciate any fresh perspective on zombies since it's all been done before, really - military experiment gone bad, rage virus, a Lazarus phenomena where people rise out of their graves and eat people. Spreading a virus through corn is kind of creepy, too, when you consider that it's available en masse everywhere you go and, as Green points out, it's inhabiting our sugars and our fuels and who knows what else now. So, yeah, bonus points for the original concept and for the original language, too. In this world, you're not a zombie, you are 'z'ed up'.
I did have a few issues with this, though. John Green said himself that this was a flawed novella and he's definitely right. For example, the main character is named Mia and she's a female. Unfortunately, John Green really doesn't do a convincing female voice, maybe because he writes Mia in the same manner in which he wrote Q, Colin, and Miles. A few things bugged me about her - her disassociated, unemotional demeanor whenever she talks about having to kill someone (to complete them, she says), her insistence to stay in Chicago when supplies were dwindling and there was the distinct possibility that the z'ed up were staying down south so that they could continue to cultivate their corn.
Save for a few flaws, this was a pretty great addition to the existing breadth of zombie lit. On my review for In The Snow, I wrote about how nice it was for John to get out of his niche a little, but this was a true effort of escape from the story he always writes. If it were up to me, I'd tell him to expand this into a novel. As such, it's a thirty-eight page novella that you can get for free, so no one has a reason not to read it.(less)
It's always pathetically sad for me when I spend a couple of days hoovering down a novel and in summation the only conclusion that I can come to is th...moreIt's always pathetically sad for me when I spend a couple of days hoovering down a novel and in summation the only conclusion that I can come to is this: eh. It was so eh that it's difficult for me to review it thoroughly and I can talk about everything - so says the guy in the doctor's office waiting room the other day that went home with a skeletal outline of my entire life story.
So, there's a girl. This girl isn't particularly memorable except in the fact that her name is Remy, which reminds me of Gambit from X-Men; maybe I would have liked Amanda Hocking's Remy more if she could throw playing cards charged with kinetic energy at zombies. So, there's Remy. Without much narrative on how she got there, it's mentioned that Remy is in a government facility that's presently being overcome with a herd (Is there a proper term for a group of zombies - a herd? a flock? a school? I'm going go go with a murder, since it seems apropos for zombies.) - nay, a murder - of coordinated zombies, which is an interesting addition to the existing zombie lore, but it's not anything I haven't seen before either. Remy escapes the facility with one goal in mind - to retrieve her little brother who had already been evacuated from the facility for mysterious reasons. Oh, the mystery!
There's not really anything new to see here. It's a formulaic plot with a few surprises, but the surprises don't do much except confuse me. A big for instance: at one point, Remy and Harlow stumble upon a lioness who is being attacked by zombies. The lioness will attack any zombie within three feet of her, but throughout the course of the book, the lioness acts like a giant tamed golden retriever for Remy, which is stupid and unfeasible, no matter how well the lion has been trained.
More hilarity: at some point during a raid of a house for supplies, in stumbles a guy and a rock star. I get it. Even before the existence of Zombieland and the whole Bill Murray thing, I was like - what if Jake Gyllenhaal and I were the only two people left in the world after a massive apocalypse and we somehow stumbled upon each other in the canned vegetable aisle at my local Wal-Mart? I don't think that the existence of a rock star bothered me as much as Amanda sort of smushing them together at every corner even though for me, Remy had more chemistry with the creepy dude that was collecting little girls to rape.
The book was okay, but it was never going to be good. There was very little plot aside from Remy's mission to get her brother back and it read like a series of events, not a novel, which is only exacerbated by Hocking's uninteresting prose. The characters weren't unlikable, but they were distinctly amorphous and boring. That's all I got. 2 stars. If you want good zombie lit, read Zombicorns. John Green 4 lyfe.(less)
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