 |
| Mostly this |
It has an interesting premise (don't they all...) where it's about 25 years* after a zombie apocalypse and a company, Zombie Inc., has cropped up as sort of a security company/pseudo-government to deal with the ever-dwindling problem of zombies. Each of the chapters starts off with a ridiculous (or sometimes scarily close to what corporate life is actually like) memo from the company about mandatory company outings and vacation time, and it even begins with the main character going to check on a zombie security system. I thought GREAT! This will be like The Office but with zombies. I can get into this.
Instead of it being that though, it's a very straight forward zombie and also corrupt-governing-body type story. Those memos at the beginning of each chapter don't really make a whole bunch of sense in this case. I guess it's to show how ridiculous and controlling things are? Maybe? But they don't really work that way. It's almost like they were left over from a different humorous/satire idea, and when the book went in a different direction those memos stayed on. A reminder of what could have been.
So I'm not getting my funny zombie story. Fine. They don't HAVE to be funny, although my disappointment at this shift could mean I am coming to the story with a tainted frame of mind. Or it could be that the story just didn't really do it for me. Cos it didn't. It was a fairly predictable story, with cliched moments of people talking about the loss that they experienced, and haunted characters that have to learn to trust other people, and people you THOUGHT could be trusted but actually nope.
If you just can't get enough of zombie stories, this might not be a bad one for you. I don't think it's going to be the BEST one for you, but if you've read all the others are still want more, you might enjoy this more than I did. Actually, you'll probably enjoy this more than me.
I went to my Kindle to look for the quotes that I highlighted to see what else I could say about the book, and I realized I wrote a LOT of notes and not that many quotes. Which usually means I either Looooooooooved the book or I did not. At all. I want to share with you the notes I took since these reactions I had were strong enough that I felt the need to stop what I was doing and try to balance on the subway long enough to type these out.
"Seems odd that after the plague we'd have the infrastructure for all of the electronics."
"No"
"But you JUST SAID it was odd that people would be having kids at all."
"Bullshit"
"How?!"
"It's been like 3 days, calm the fuck down"
"So, looking out windows is not a thing now?"
"OMG we fucking get it"
"Those are not the right descriptors..."
"Thanks for spelling it out."
"Because she's Jason Bourne?"
"OH DO YOU? Because that wasn't clear"
Gif rating:
*Timing and people's ages kept shifting slightly or else just wouldn't line up. The fact that I was more interested in pulling up a calculator on the subway and figuring out the discrepancies rather than, you know, just going with it and enjoying the story, didn't really bode well.
Title quote from page 135, location 1952
Dougherty, Chris. Zombie, Inc. Dougherty Books, 2013.
