Book #26 of 2023: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks The modern ‘zombie apocalypse’ genre was already in full swing in 2006 when this book made its rather curious debut, with the associated tropes well-known enough to be mined for comedy in films like Shaun of the Dead …
Continue reading “Book Review: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks”
Book #216 of 2021: Jews Versus Zombies edited by Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene I like this short story collection marginally better than its sister volume on extraterrestrials — my individual ratings average to 3.25 out of five stars this time, an improvement on my previous 2.5 — but it’s still a decidedly mixed bag …
Continue reading “Book Review: Jews Versus Zombies edited by Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene”
Book #35 of 2021: The Bone Houses by Emily Lloyd-Jones It’s always neat to see a fantasy story built on Welsh mythology, but the plot to this one is a slower and pretty generic quest narrative, and I haven’t quite found the protagonists interesting enough to justify spending so much of the novel with just …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Bone Houses by Emily Lloyd-Jones”
Book #76 of 2020: Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland (Dread Nation #2) This Reconstruction-era zombie sequel is enough of an improvement over the debut that I’m happy to bump my rating up to four stars. Overall the various elements are maybe still pulling in too many different directions, but a nebulous plot works better here …
Continue reading “Book Review: Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland”
Movie #11 of 2019: Cooties (2014) Even by the standards of low-budget horror schlock, this zom-com is pretty bad. There’s potential in the premise of elementary teachers fending off their infected pupils, but too much of the intended humor relies on nothing but gross-out gore effects and the inherent transgressiveness of violence to and by …
TV #29 of 2019: iZombie, season 5 iZombie has been a bit lifeless for a while now, and it finally shambles to a rest here. I hate to say it about a series that I once loved, but the last season of this zombie-cop comedy is just awful. The case-of-the-week stuff occasionally still delivers, but …
Book #216 of 2018: Dread Nation by Justina Ireland (Dread Nation #1) This novel offers a great character voice and an intriguing world: a version of Reconstruction-era America in which the Civil War has ended prematurely due to a sudden zombie uprising. Unfortunately, the plot is fairly uneven, and the tone is all over the …
Continue reading “Book Review: Dread Nation by Justina Ireland”
TV #31 of 2018: iZombie, season 4 I really admire how iZombie has blown up its own premise in every finale (except this one, oddly) and expanded the scope of its story in every season premiere, but this time the writers have really bitten off more than they could chew. The worldbuilding in this season …
Book #123 of 2018: Blackout by Mira Grant (Newsflesh #3) I’ve enjoyed Mira Grant’s bloggers-fighting-zombies trilogy far more than I ever expected to, but the plot in this final volume is pretty slow and coincidence-heavy compared to what’s come before. One character spends the entire first half of the book quarantined in a CDC hospital, …
Book #245 of 2017: The Boy on the Bridge by M.R. Carey Among the great strengths of author M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts are its unique viewpoint character and the gradual way that it eases readers into some key realizations about her world. But given those strengths, it’s hard not to feel …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Boy on the Bridge by M.R. Carey”
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more