| Zomblog Posted: I want to give this book more than three stars, but I just cannot do it.
While the concept of the journal seemed interesting, and the reviews of this style enticed me into buying and reading the book, I found the style jarring and unsatisfying for two reasons. First of all, each day's entry is very short. Many are a page or less. Others are, at most, two or three pages long. This means that there is not really time to get engaged in the action. Sure, there are exceptions, and there are a few scenes where I really did feel engaged, but for the majority of the book I felt like I was just going from one short story to another. It simply made it hard for me to get engaged in the book in a meaningful way.
Secondly, and this may be a spoiler unless you have read some of the other reviews, our original protagonist Sam dies and his journal is continued by his former love interest. As much as I want to give Brown a pat on the back for being bold enough to kill off his protagonist after about 175 pages, just as I really started to get the feeling that the book was hitting its stride, I simply cannot do it.
This is what bothered me the most about the book. You want to respect an author for trying something like that. It takes stones to take such a step in an attempt to jar your audience. I get it. At that point in the story, Sam is starting to hit his stride. He is going from simply a survival mindset to one of reflection and introspection. He is evolving and getting interesting. Then, bam, he is dead. It is like Brown was saying to his audience: "Guess what? You saw all that death going on around Sam, particularly his family and the Thompson family, and you started to think Sam was immune, didn't you? Well he's not. Deal with it.... "
When I reached that part of the story, I made a note. I said I wanted to respect the author, and I was interested to see how he would handle shifting gears in the middle of his book from writing from the perspective of a 40-something man to a 30 year old woman. But you know what? After several pages, I just really did not care. This is where the short, disjointed blog format, I believe, really hurts the story. Things started happening to Meredith, thing involving the undead and the living, but, as the meme goes, not a single [expletive] was given that day. We liked Sam because we knew his story. We knew how he got from z-plague day zero to z-plague day whenever-he-died, and that is what made us interested. Meredith simply took over, and we knew nothing about her other than the rape story. It simply is not the same as following Sam through from day zero.
That brings us to the ending, which I found completely unsatisfying. Although I dislike stories with a happy ending, especially when they are told in some wishy-washy epilogue, I really hate stories that simply end abruptly and with zero explanation. I do not need to be hit in the head with a bat by an author, but I also do not want he/she to leave me with the blue balls, either.
Now that I have aired my grievances with the book, I will go ahead and shift to something else. In spite of my complaints, Brown can write really well. I have read some stories in this genre where the action was fast paced and some of the characters were compelling, but the author really did not have a huge talent for painting a picture with his words. That is not a problem for Brown. Although each scene is brief, due to the blog/journal style of narrative he chose to write, the action sequences are very well described and particularly gruesome. He also took the time to create a well rounded zombie apocalypse universe, in spite of the fact that the narrative format he chose limited the scope that he could cover, taking the time to touch on some of the themes with which we are all familiar.
That is why I wish I could give this book more than three stars: I know TW Brown can write really well. Unfortunately the things that I have written about in my review have forced me to remove two stars. Hopefully the next TW Brown zombie book that I read will force me to give all five? |
0 comments:
Post a Comment