Book Review: The Girl with All the Gifts

I actually came across The Girl with All the Gifts not because I'm a fan of the author (Mike Carey's The Unwritten being one of my favourite comic series), and not because the trailer for the film adaption just came out (starring Glen Close - HOLY CATS!), and no, not even because I spent a year reading largely only zombie-themed post-apocalyptic fiction, but instead because my wife read it and thought it would be my thing.

The Girl with All the Gifts is an incredibly well written in-depth character look at a small military base existing in the UK after an (mild spoiler) Extinction Level Event involving zombies. The novel focuses on a ten year-old girl named Melanie and that's just about all I want to say about it, plot wise.

Having read a LOT of zombie fiction over my life, what I really love about this book is the different way it went in concept and just how much it made me care about (or at least relate to) all of it's characters.

Totally worth the read, even if Horror books are not really your thing, and yes, this book will absolutely find it's way onto my shelves at home soon.

Game Review: Red Dead Redemption

Yesterday I finished the PS3 game Red Dead Redemption (at 96.8% completion after a month, thank you very much), and overall, I'd have to say it's a pretty solid game.

The story moves ahead nicely, the visuals and music are really quite great, and except for the fact that virtually every group you can imagine is treated pretty horribly (Latinos, First Nations, Chinese, the Government, and women all come across very poorly in the game - not even Anthropologists are spared), and that some of the mini-games are crazy hard to do (five-finger fillet, anyone?), I would strongly recommend the game to people who are on the fence.

Also, although the cover of the game (pictured left), includes Zombies, they don't exist anywhere in the main game (although a couple of bites got me a little nervous), as Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare works as a separate game, with all the same characters as the main game, but with the addition of zombies and various monsters.

So now I've got a couple more weeks of the old west, followed by season two of The Walking Dead game, and then I'm off to figure out what all the hubub about Mass Effect is...

First Impressions: Resident Evil 5

Continuing with my habit of playing games on my PS3 that were popular three or more years ago, I've spent the last weekend playing the 2009 video game, Resident Evil 5.

Years ago when I first came into contact with the Resident Evil series, it was through the original Playstation game Resident Evil 2, wherein you played through the same story twice first as a rookie cop named Leon and a college student named Claire, who have overlapping stories and the first example of long-term planning I've come across in gaming - wherein if on your first play through you use up all the resources available in certain locations, there will be nothing left for you to use on your second time through the game as the other character.

After playing my way through Resident Evil 2, I got a lot more interested in the zombie sub-genre of horror, and have enjoyed all of the movies as they've become available on DVD.  I hadn't actually touched any of the other games in the series however, until this one.

The pacing of Resident Evil 5 is quite different than that of 2, for starters the "zombies" are actually infected humans and are therefore much cleverer and faster than the majority of the creatures in the earlier game.  I will happily admit I got stuck for a long time in the first stage of the game as I couldn't quite put together what the game designers wanted me to do and had to look for tips online to figure my way past.

Otherwise the game is pretty fun, the setting is interesting and once I got a handle on the how the controls worked I began moving my way through the story at a pretty good clip. The scares are definitely there, and although the plot seems a little overly complicated for my taste, it's still a fun way to play a great horror story in a well-established series.

Season Review: The Walking Dead Season 3

Okay, my wife and I just finished the mid-season finale of season three of The Walking Dead and it was pretty freaking awesome.

Obvious spoilers to follow.

Unlike a lot of folks out there, I actually liked the second season, yes it was slower, yes it all happened at a single location, but you know what, I really liked the opportunity it gave for character development throughout.

Season three starts a few months after season two and zombie killing stated less than a minute into the first episode.  As a long-time fan of the comic book series, I was thrilled that this season finally gets the group to the prison and introduces the characters of Michonee and The Governor (one I love, the other I love to hate).

Throughout this season I really enjoyed the juxtaposition between the nasty people living in the lovely town of Woodbury and the nice people living in a nasty (and still partially zombie infested) prison.

I'm really enjoying where the show seems to be taking the characters and was happy that the series kept one of my favourite parts from the comic (Rick and the phone call).

I know I've got a couple months to wait before the season continues, but so far I'm really happy with the third season.

Genre Character of the Week: Eddie Hudson

Although the majority of my October horror experience was involved in the Saw franchise, I did get to enjoy a few other horror films and books.  Case in point - Dead City by Joe McKinney.  I actually picked up this book because I read the Bram Stoker winner of best horror novel each year, and McKinney's The Flesh Eaters won this year - but as it is the third in the series, I went back to book one, Dead City, and found my genre character of the week, Eddie Hudson.

Eddie is a patrolman in San Antonio, Texas, who spends an average day worrying about a fight he's having with his wife when the dead begin to rise.

From that point on we are treated to Eddie's harrowing escape from a city quickly overrun by the undead and get a good look at how quickly things might fall apart as the people who show up at emergencies (police, fire and ambulance workers) become the first to fall and change.

McKinney, a police officer in San Antonio himself, gives Eddie a great, ground-floor view of a zombie rising from the point of view of the police, and I actually found a lot the technical detail to be really interesting and compelling throughout.

Like my personal favourite zombie-fighting police officer, Eddie comes across as a regular guy in terrible circumstances and although the events of the novel only follow the course of a day, I would definitely be interested in checking out further books featuring the character.

Movie Review: Undead or Alive - A Zombedy

As I've mentioned previously, I got a Zombie-themed calendar for Christmas last year and although there are a lot of simple quotes like

January 12 - BRAINS!!!

or

June 23 - OMG! It's a Zombie!

most of the entries are references to zombie books, games and movies, and I'm enjoying checking them out.

A great example - the 2007 Zombie/Western/Comedy mashup, Undead or Alive: A Zombedy, starring Chris Kattan and James Denton.  I got the movie during one of my previous used-bookstore runs and as I've got another coming up, I thought I should check it out in case it isn't worth owning.

Guess what?  This is actually a really fun movie, with much better writing and direction than I expected.  The two leads are great together, with Chris Kattan playing a Don Knotts-style western hero and James Denton playing the classic smooth-talking coutlaw.  The two men partner up (sort of) and end up fighting hoards of zombies.

I don't want to give much up plot-wise, but if you can get a hold of the film it's worth the watch, but even though there is a lot of comedy, it is a zombie film, so be prepared for some graphic violence.

This one I'm keeping.

Genre Character of the Week: Roy, the best friend

Following the advice of a classmate, I spent the weekend watching my local libraries copy of the Norwegian film Dead Snow, in which a group of vacationing med students are set upon by nazi zombies.

 

Super Quick Review: Gory, Actiony Fun!

 

I chose Roy (not to be confused with previous GCotW Ray) as my character of the week not because he’s the most sympathetic (Martin), or the most movie-savvy (Erlend), but because he’s got my favourite line of dialogue in the movie and I can quote it as the only spoiler it gives is given away in both the trailer and the poster:

 

Roy: (Talking on his cell-phone) Hello,  9-1-1-?  We’ve been attacked by what look like German zombies from the Second World War.  And we set our cabin on fire by accident!

(Jerks phone away from ear)

Roy: The B**** hung up on me!

 

If you haven’t seen the movie before it’s totally worth it – it clearly owes a lot to both the Evil Dead movies and Shaun of the Dead, both in humour and in extreme levels of gore, but I found it a lot of fun.

You Got Your Star Wars all over my Zombies!

For my long-time readers this isn’t really news, but for the few of you who haven’t been here before, here is some important background info: 1) I (Bookmonkey) love horror, 2) Zombie stories are some of my favourite examples of the sub-genre, 3) I’m not really a fan of mash-ups.

My problem with mash-ups comes down to the cultural juggernaut that is Glee.  Basically, rather than write songs of their own, they spent a lot of the first season wrecking personal favourite songs of mine (I stopped watching about halfway through the season), and in the sixth episode the concept of the Mash-up was introduced to popular culture, (NOTE: Of course I know mash-ups have been in existence for over a decade now) or at least to me, which meant that the show could ruin twice as many of my favourite songs at a time.

Literary mash-ups really got going recently with the introduction of the book Pride & Prejudice and Zombies, by Seth Graham-Smith.  Interestingly enough the very same month P&P&Z came out, a little book by Joe Schreiber also came out, called Star Wars: Death Troopers.

In addition to loving zombies (well, loving zombie stories, I wouldn’t want to have any over for dinner), I am a pretty big fan of Star War.  I’m not as good a fan as my BFF Mike (who has written his own review of Death Troopers here), for instance I still prefer to call the Ithorian Momaw Nadon Hammerhead, because that’s what I called him for years.  Anyway, as Mike and I have been reading parallel genre fiction for years (he focuses on Science Fiction while I tend to focus on Horror) it is a pretty rare story that brings us together.  Last time it was the Canadian horror film Splice.

The book is really fast.  Clocking in at 234 pages I read the whole thing in about two days of bus trips, coffee breaks and lunches.  The story follows a traditional biological-based zombie outbreak (think ...28 days later) set on a prison ship about a year before the events of Star Wars: A New Hope.

I actually found the book to be a lot of fun – it was considerably less gruesome than the last zombie book I read (the classic Zombie anthology Book of the Dead – more on that next week), and the Star Wars stuff didn’t overwhelm the delicious taste of zombie (again I mean figuratively, who on earth would eat literal zombie?).  Did the story work?  Absolutely, it was fun, scary and probably a little more visceral than most Star Wars fans are used to.

I guess it could be considered a gateway book for fans of Space Opera who really need to up their zombie quotient (which by the way is all of them!)

Things I've Noticed: I'm Starting to become a Zombie Expert

I once heard that if you want to be an expert in anything you need to spend 10,000 hours studying it. When I think of the things I’ve spent even close to that time studying the list gets pretty small (Obvsiously not including my wife, kids, schooling, etc.l.

1) Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

2) Fantasy Stories

3) Horror Stories

4) Science Fiction Stories

5) Reading

6) Watching Television

7) Watching Movies

After that, there are a few things I’ve studied for maybe 5000 hours; comic books, vampire stories, role playing games and zombie-themed horror stories

For Christmas last year I received a Zombie-themed desk calendar, which has been giving me new quotes, books, movies and games related to zombies for the past 47 days. Slowly but surely I’m building my knowledge of zombies in popular culture and this nifty little calendar his given me a lot of interesting starting points.

Now here’s my question for today – we (well, most of us) have losts of chunks of 10,000 hours to go in our lives – what exactly would you like to spend them on towards becoming an expert at?

For me (right now) it’s zombie trivia and knowledge, but eventually I’ll want to add Grandparenting, swimming, and other stuff to the list.

So I’ll leave you with the best advice I can give you on the topic, in the immortal words of any number of zombies...

BRAINS!!!

Read into that what you will.

What did you get in your stocking?

Merry Christmas everyone from all of us at Wisdom of Bookmonkey (and by us I mean me - and my lovely wife for giving me a few minutes to bang out a quick Christmas post).

As a kid there were three basic staples when it came to my Christmas Stocking - Mandarin Orange, Socks and Underwear. As I've gotten older and more genre enthused however, the contents of my stocking has changed.

This year I got an expansion set for the Zombies! board game (a fun little zombie themed party game that works quite well if you are looking for something horror themed that lasts about an hour), as well as a Zombie desk calendar. Past that I got the standard mandarin orange, as well as a Terry's Chocolate Orange and some underwear (some things never change).

Anyway, as that is about all I have time for, just a quick question - What did you get in your stocking this year?

Game Review - Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

Today I thought I would take a quick look at my latest game for the PS3, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. I know that this game is almost five years old now, but as I've only had my console for about a year, I'm just getting around to these classics.

A quick note - the game has twenty-three chapters and I'm only on Chapter twenty, so although I've played the majority of the game, I haven't finished it yet.

The three points I want to make about the game are as follows:

1) The game is pretty similar to the Tomb Raider series, basically you enter an environment, kill whatever is running around there and then move things about to find the exit.

2) That said, the graphics are pretty darn amazing and the fight scenes demand any number of creative solutions - going in and shooting Rambo-style will work for a few of these fights but most of them require some sort of strategy.

3) This game (and I say this as a hard-core Zombie fan), really doesn't need the (mild spoiler) Zombies in the final act. Seriously, the entire game up to the last few chapters has done a pretty good job of being an Indiana Jones-style game wherein a treasure hunter is fighting off other treasure hunters - why exactly does the game need to go all Resident Evil in the end? Also, for a game with such incredible graphics it is a little annoying to spend the last few chapters chasing (and running from) zombies in dark cement hallways.

In the end I'm enjoying the game, but I'll probably trade it away after I've beaten it - a fun play, but the sudden switch of genres at the end seems kind of forced and ends up taking the game out of my library of games.