Home » Archive by category "Uncategorized" (Page 45)

Book Review: Delicious Zombie by Wol-vriey

 

Delicious Zombie by Wol-vriey

Burning Bulb Publishing, 2022

ISBN: 9781948278485

Available: paperback, Kindle edition

Buy: Amazon.com

 

Would you be okay with cannibalism if it would stop the aging process?

 

That’s the idea behind Delicious Zombie, a tour de splat that adds some new twists to the zombie apocalypse storyline.  The zombies are all humans that have been infected with a virus that makes them eat anything alive– nothing new there.  But, uninfected humans who eat zombies find that the aging process slows, and actually reverses, keeping everyone in their late 20s-early 30s.  Diseases like cancer?  A thing of the past, thanks to zombie meat.  All ills have been conquered, thanks to eating undead people that used to be normal human beings.

 

However, not everyone is happy about the idea of immortality, since it involves munching on your former neighbors.  Scientist Ethan Hackman and his companions Paula and Zoe lead a clandestine mission to Ohio to recover the cure for zombies, which has been hidden away by the powers that be.  It’s a question of whether they can survive, because a LOT of people don’t want the status quo changed.

 

This author has always excelled at writing fast-paced stories with a large dose of messiness, and this one is no exception.  What makes this one good is the author’s world-building: it’s quite the dystopia!  This is one story that actually makes the zombies sympathetic characters, which is unusual in the genre.  It’s a haunting place: there is a Church of Zombie, which preaches “digestion is salvation” ; the poor zombies are kept on farms for slaughter, and some people even keep a live zombie at home to cut off a piece of meat whenever they feel the urge.  It’s factory farming gone crazy.  At the grocery store, you go up to the deli counter and order whatever cut of a person you want.  Needless to say, serious ethical questions are present in this book!  That’s why the book is much more than the standard undead stories.  It’s not just the usual ‘plucky humans trying to survive a zombie plague,’  there’s a plotline with some real thought to it.  It’s enough to keep the reader engaged right through the last pages of the book.

 

Bottom line: if you like zombie stories and are hungry for one with some originality that will make you think, this one is the way to go.  Recommended.

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

Posted on October 27, 2023 by , Reply

Book Review: Fettered and Other Tales of Terror by Greye La Spina, edited by Michael J. Phillips Jr.

Fettered and Other Tales of Terror by Greye La Spina, edited by Michael J. Phillips Jr.

From Beyond Press, 2023

ISBN-13: 979-8987574331

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

Buy: Bookshop.org | Amazon.com

 

 

 

Greye La Spina (1880-1969) was a prolific American writer, who published in various genre magazines (e.g. Weird Tales) more than one hundred dark short stories and novelettes, most of which, sadly, have been lost.

 

During her lifetime she was extremely popular, more than HP Lovecraft (who, incidentally, had a low opinion of her fictional work).

 

Tracing her stories is indeed a hard task nowadays, so praise to From Beyond Press for making available again to the public some of her production.

 

The present volume collects four stories and a novella, providing to today’s readers a pleasant, small  taste of her body of work.

 

“Fettered” is a dark novella dealing with the theme of vampirism, certainly a bit outdated today, but addressed by La Spina with a vivid and disquieting approach, able to unsettle even the readers well-used to this particular topic.

 

“The Last Cigarette” is a very short but effective story featuring a suicidal man whose plans are ruined by an unexpected occurrence.

 

“The Remorse of Professor Panebianco”, despite its unlikely pseudoscientific basis, is a powerful, intriguing story able to fascinate and disturb.

 

In the tense, dramatic “The Scarf of the Beloved”, a grave robber has to face a terrible truth, while in the engrossing “Wolf of the Steppes” a dangerous werewolf is finally discovered and defeated.

 

The themes addressed in the included stories are traditional enough, but I have the feeling that this is the very reason why these specific tales have survived or have been saved throughout the years.

 

Reviewed by Mario Guslandi

Posted on October 26, 2023 by , Reply

Book Review: Hares in the Hedgerow (The Gardening Guidebooks Trilogy #2) by Jessica McHugh

Hares in the Hedgerow (The Gardening Guidebooks Trilogy #2) by Jessica McHugh

Ghoulish Books, 2022

ISBN: 9781943720767

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

Buy:  Bookshop.org

 

Little did readers of Rabbits in the Garden, the first book to introduce Avery and her crazy mother Faye in The Gardening Guidebooks Trilogy, realize the full extent of the horror to come. As Avery tries to face her demons in the next book, Rabbits in the Hedgerow, by beating them out of her willing counselor while raising her sister’s daughter (Sophie), she slowly learns her mother Faye’s backstory as leader of a demented cult devoted to St. Agnes.

 

The central character in the new narrative, Sophie, is in terrible danger because she has been the victim of her boyfriend Liam’s machinations to bring her into the cult as its central figure. Sophie is blinded by her love for Liam as well as what she believes are her mother’s past crimes. Luckily, however, Sophie is smart enough to sort fact from fiction in time to make important decisions before Faye, her grandmother, leads everyone to their doom. 

 

In Hares in the Hedgerow, McHugh drives us full force into the psychological twists and turns of a cult’s sickness and the damaged minds of its victims. There is no shortage of physical violence in this book. We see the devastation of human lives up close, and it is unrelenting. The plot is a carefully layered history of three generations of women who have been their own worst enemies as well as destroyers of the people around them. Anything can happen, but none of it is going to be good.

 

Just as in the first book in the trilogy, the second is fast-paced with past and present events illuminating our understanding of the characters and leading to yet another explosive ending. But, just as compelling as the momentum is the way McHugh makes us believe we are looking into the minds of real people, the type that would have followed someone like Charles Manson. There is the fear we feel for the characters but also the fear we feel for ourselves knowing that fanaticism and a skewed perception can, in fact, exist side by side in the real world and that everyday people sometimes create horror and then willingly enter into it in senselessly appalling ways. 

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

Posted on October 18, 2023 by , Reply
First « 4344454647 » Last