Ed's Mini Book Review - The Road

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The Road is my first review upon request. A friend of mine asked me to read and review it so I thought I'd give it a shot and not see the movie first. Coincidentally, a fellow librarian saw the film and Tweeted that it was one of the most depressing films he'd ever seen, so I tried to keep that sentiment out of mind while I read the book.

The first thing that struck me about The Road, was that it was a lot like much of the zombie books I read. They are all essentially survival books, or as many call it in the zombie fiction world, survival horror. At the essence of survival horror is that there is some sort of global phenomenon and wipes out much of the world's population and we follow along survivors who try to make due in a lawless land with the original phenomena, and the horrors it brings, hanging overhead. Though we quickly find out, in most of these books, that the original threat is not the biggest threat out there, and that threat is other survivors.

With The Road, we follow along an unnamed man and his young son, after some unnamed global catastrophe, as they make their way along the road, heading toward the sea in hopes of finding....something. The global disaster happened some years ago and resources are scarce so many of the surviving humans have resorted to some horrible acts to stay alive. The unnamed father continues to hold on to his morals and teaches his son to be one of the "good-guys" in this mad world as he also tries to protect his young child from the horrors that men do.

Filled with sub textual religious overtones, The Road paints a bleak picture of a world without order and a world in which people will do almost anything to survive. Haunting in parts but ultimately uplifting (in my opinion) without going for the "Hollywood ending", I can see why The Road is a multi-award winning work of fiction. I particularly liked that while it seemed that there wasn't much action happening as they traveled along the road, a lot was happening, if you catch my drift.

The Road is a quick read and a good read. I am interested to hear other opinions on the book. Did you find it depressing or ultimately positive as I did?

My Grade: A-

LL

Ed's Mini Book Review - The Rising by Brian Keene

Another recommended book in my search for more Survival Horror, or Zombie Books if you'd rather refer to them as that. And this one comes highly recommended at that from a friend that has read an insane amount of survival horror.

My take is that I don't know what my friend was thinking. He's turned me on to some excellent survival horror stuff but this book doesn't fall into that category. Some others he put me on to, Day by Day Armageddon for instance, were very good but this one, which as little different bend to the zombies and how they come into being, falls flat with repetitive and gratuitous scenes and a real let down of an ending.

It goes a little something like this. Typical survival horror with zombies rising and noshing on whoever is around. Trick is that these undead are actually possessed by demons who want to nibble a bit on you, just until you die but damage the whole body so that another demon can swoop in and posses the newly dead, and partially eaten corpse.

Follow so far? Good.

The story follows a few characters but the main one is Jim, traveling from Virginia to New Jersey to rescue his son. From that most noble of causes we get to see the dark side of humanity, when society breaks down and we are left to fend for ourselves. Now, this is nothing new in the survival horror genre and I think that is a big problem with this book. There is so much time devoted to the evils that are done, by humans to other humans, and repetitive at that, the story seems to spin its tires for long stretches. Add to it that if you've read any other survival stories, this theme has been done over and over again and after the fourth or fifth rape scene or the umpteenth soldier smashing someones face with a rifle butt, you are bored out of your skull. Many times reading this book I wanted to shout "All right already, we get it already, people are just as dangerous as the monsters!".

I actually put this book down for about six months and picked it up again when I was in the mood for some zombie stuff and fought my way to finish it. I thought of picking up the sequel, City of the Dead, but read some reviews that said that this book was better so I'll skip it, which it my recommendation for this book, skip it.

My Grade: C-

LL