I went in to reading this with very little expectations. I kind of thought I would hate it, I hadn't read anything by the man who ushered in the literary / zombie mash-up genre, but I figured he was pretty much a one-trick pony, a hack who happened on a great idea, someone who would be about as funny as I imagine Christopher Moore to be (I haven't read him, but when does that stop me from having strong and unfounded opinions).

Maybe it was because I had so little hope for this book, maybe because I expected to dislike it and get to write one of my reviews attacking the book and everything else that comes to mind while I'm sitting at my computer and then rack up big votes because people seem to react better to mean-spiritedness from me than from when I like something, maybe that is why I ended up liking the book. Maybe. Or maybe it was just a fun re-telling (well telling because the story isn't really there to begin with) of one of those big empty spaces in the Bible.

The basic book report gist of the book is that the three wisemen are actually murderous thieves and they meet up with Mary, Joseph and JC and with Herod's men out to capture the thieves and murder any male baby they can find and this rag-tag group make their way across Judea to Egypt. Along the way a new history of the founding of Christianity, the lives of the people who pop-up in the gospels and the fate of the Roman Empire are created. It's a re-imagining, not an attempt at a secret history, and it's good and at times very grisly and gory fun (and yes there are some zombie like creatures in the book).

I was sort of expecting this book to be a little more gleefully blasphemous, and maybe those with a religious bent will find something terribly wrong about this story, but I thought it was fairly respectful of religion. But then again I find The Last Temptation of Christ to be uber-sympathtic to JC and more likely to make me want to think of him as someone worthy of deification than most of the one-dimensional pictures created about him by fundamentalists. But then again JC is only a couple of week old infant in the book so there really isn't too much the little nipple-sucker can do in the book (besides sucking on nipples, he does this in a fair amount of his page-space).

Did I mention the book is quite gory? I guess I did, but it is worth mentioning again, because it had a few moments that made me cringe, which is a little rare when I'm reading. The action / violence scenes were also fairly here, normally my eyes glaze over when reading about fights and big action sequences, but they were done well. They made me kind of wish they would make a movie out of this, although they would have to keep some of the Eli Roth worthy scenes of gruesome torture / death.

I don't have too much else to say, I thought maybe I'd ramble on about religion and the Bible and all of that, but I've done enough of that in other reviews, I'll just leave this review fairly boring and on topic.

Oh, and if anyone would like to read this before it comes out let me know and I'll pass along the ARC.