Hollowland
Hollowland by Amanda Hocking
CreateSpace 2010
ISBN: 9781453860953
Available in e-book and paperback
The zombie apocalypse. It's all the rage right now. Everyone is talking about it, everyone is reading and writing about it, and Amanda Hocking got it done right.
Remy is one of the remaining people left alive after the outbreak of the virus consumed the majority of the world. She and her little brother, Max, have seen their parents killed by these monsters and are now hold up in a quarantine, a sort of haven, for survivors who have not yet been infected by the virus. 'Yet' being the operative word. As the case with any virus, the virus is starting to adapt, starting to become smarter thus turning their hosts into something more advanced than they had been before. The zombies, once mindless, random killing machines, are now working together; it could indicate the downfall for humankind.
This was the first book of Amanda Hocking's that I have ever read. I probably would have never read it, except we will be talking about it in the next episode of the blog talk radio show I am one of the hosts for. I had heard of her, but I generally have a tendency to stay away from overly hyped-up stuff. Then someone, somehow drags me into the overly hyped-up stuff, and I usually love the hell outta it. This was definitely the case with Hollowland.
The thing I love most about it were the zombies themselves. They were still 'people'. I know the idea of a virus creating zombies is not a novel one; however, the way it was written in this book was. The virus infected the human and strips away the brains of the infected person thus turning them into a mindless shell. The infection spreads through the body and corrupts the blood and the organs eventually killing the host. The dead bodies do not reanimate, they simply…die. While this takes a bit of the horror and spooky factor away from the zombie, it definitely adds a gross and fascinating aspect to them.
As much as I liked this book, there are a few parts about it that bugged me, hence the reason for the four stars opposed to the five stars I would have liked to have given this book. We hear a bunch about her brother, Max, and there is some mystery surrounding him. But there were SO MANY hints thrown through the book, I wanted to scream "JUST GET ON WITH IT ALREADY" a few times. The blatantly obvious hints (which I'm assuming they were supposed to be teasers) were so obvious that I almost felt like my intelligence had been insulted by not just coming out and saying it after a while.
The other major complaint that I have about it is the editing. I understand that she is a self published author, but that DOES not mean that some of these errors should be allowed. The content itself was fantastic, I think she had that part down great, but there were parts in there where she had gender issues with her pronouns and EASY words misspelled. That is one of the quickest ways to ruin something truly spectacular. Nothing brings you crashing back down to earth more quickly than seeing typos, misspellings and errors riddled through the book. Had the content not been as spectacular as it was, this would have been a 3 star book because of the errors. But, her storytelling ability in this book rivals that of some of my favorite authors, and I don't say that lightly, so I let it slide this time.
This woman told a great zombie book, boys – do NOT be afraid that because a woman wrote this, the whole zombie "feel" will be lost. This is a great addition to my zombie collection, thank you to Cambria who talked me into reading an overly hyped book that I never would have picked up otherwise. PS – if anyone knows when the sequel is coming out, I would like to know. The cliffhanger is killing me!!
