THIS is How it's Done...

PRAY TO STAY DEAD by Mason James Cole (2011 Print is Dead / 327 pp. / tp and ebook)


It's end-of-the-world zombie apocalypse time once again...but before you let out a frustrated yawn , listen up: while it's true you've probably read this a hundred times before, PRAY is one of those novels that despite its familiar story, manages to work.  And it works in a big way.


Set in 1974, PRAY follows five friends on their trip to a Lake Tahoe getaway.  They stop in an isolated town to get food and gas at a small store owned by a senior couple (Misty and her crackpot husband, Crate) and before long they're abducted by an insane backwoods family who waste no time slaughtering the men and taking the women captive.  Much of the story is seen through the eyes of Colleen; she's forced into an Amish-like religious cult whose Manson-like leader, Huffington Neibolt, has been kidnapping and impregnating women for years as part of a Noah-like survival strategy for the coming apocalypse.  When the dead start to rise around the world, it only encourages Huffington all the more that his stable of wives (and stockpile of weapons) were truly the Lord's work.


Meanwhile, a black Vietnam vet named Reggie is trying to travel from California to New Mexico in an attempt to locate and rescue his daughter (cue Brian Keene's THE RISING) when he comes across a cop named Cardo.  Reggie rescues him from a rooftop that's surrounded by zombies, and the two travel on, eventually coming to the aforementioned gas station where they help the elderly couple survive in a classic NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD finale.


Cole manages to craft believable, likeable characters whose pain we feel on mental, physical, and even spiritual levels.  His antagonists are basically right out of 70s redneck slasher films, and cause more terror among our survivors than the undead (although there's no shortage of zombie carnage here).  While PRAY does have the action and feel of a trashy grindhouse film, Cole's way of spinning his tale puts this one leaps and bounds above the abundance of modern zombie novels; it may be mainly by-the-numbers, but it goes down so smooth you won't know what hit you.


I'm as sick of zombies as anyone else...but when something as entertaining and well-written as PRAY TO STAY DEAD comes along, it re-kindles my love for the undead just a little bit longer.  'Tis a bloody good show.