Archie Horror: Post 3: Afterlife with Archie

After that delightful little trip into an aspect of Archie comics I didn't know existed, it's time to get to the main even, Afterlife with Archie written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa with art by Francesco Francavilla.  At the most basic level, the story is really simple; 

What if there were a zombie outbreak in Riverdale?

Archie comics have done many crossovers and genre switches in the past, most famously with the crime-noir adaptation that is the current CW show Riverdale, but previously including crossovers with The Punisher, KISS, and even The Predator.

What I love about Afterlife With Archie is the simplest thing, not the fact that Dilton is now an encyclopedic expert in horror trivia, nor the fact that Betty and Veronica have also become horror fans in this world.  Nope, it's the fact that I know everyone.

When watching zombie series like The Walking Dead, you definitely feel for the leads, but as wave after wave of the undead move towards them, it becomes increasingly easier to forget that these were all regular folk once, with there own goals, hopes, and dreams, and instead focus on the cool visuals.

The genius of what Aguirre-Sacasa and Francavilla have done with this comic is to populate it with people I've grown up reading, I know all about the rivalries, friendships, and back stories of all theses characters, from dedicated readings as a little kid, to watching the animated series, and even occasionally leafing through the issues now as I wait in the grocery line.  By using these characters that we know so well, they make every single new zombie in the outbreak personally heartbreaking, because we've been reading about these characters forever, even if only ironically we have a degree of investment and it hurts a little every time a new character falls to the zombies and rises again...

Which to be fair, makes it even more horrifying.

Well played gentlemen, well played.

Book Review: The Walking Dead: Invasion

As it's the fifth tie-in novel to Robert Kirkman's comic book series, Jay Bonansinga's The Walking Dead, Invasion continues to follow the character of Lily Caul as she attempts to (spoiler for fans of tie-in novels) rebuild the pieces of the recently destroyed Woodbury during the events of The Walking Dead: Fall of the Governor and The Walking Dead: Descent.

Unfortunately for me, the book brings forth one of the staples of American Southern Horror novels - the evil priest. Now I'm not against a story in which an authority figure abuses his or her power to the point where they need to get what's coming to them, but this specific trope is so common in Southern horror, that I would love to read a novel about a kind-hearted Southern priest who does the decent thing because that's what would be most surprising to me in a horror novel these days.

Overall the story moves at a nice pace, and moves between four separate story lines allowing for a good narrative buildup throughout, the tension is very high, and, ignoring the overused evil-priest stereotype, it was a pretty solid read.

Game Review: Lollipop Chainsaw

So I just finished the zombie-themed horror comedy game Lollipop Chainsaw yesterday which pits an eighteen-year-old cheerleader/monster hunter against a potential zombie apocalypse and in the end it was pretty fun.

The best parts of the game were the concepts and dialogue, the banter was witty, the zombies were silly (think Dan O'Bannon's The Return of the Living Dead wherein the zombies generally speak one liners and you get the idea), and the idea of racing through zombie hoards with the goal of getting home for your birthday party and pairing zombie destroying with interpersonal relationships was pretty fun.  A personal highlight - fighting the video-game themed zombies in levels which mirrored classic arcade games.

The game did fall a little in the control department - the controls felt a little clunky, and often I would be hitting the combos as outline with no result multiple times before a combo would occur.

I did like the fact that each level ends with a report card (counting zombie kills, number of continues used, etc), so it would be easy to play the game again and see if you could beat your old score.

Having long been a fan of the films of James Gunn (Slither, Super, etc.), I felt the game had a pretty fun feel overall, but could have had some help in the monotony of the levels - different types of zombies appeared, which was fun, but each level was a "clear the room and move on" type, with limited puzzles or other types of games involved.

Book Review: Flesh Eaters

Being a life-long fan of Horror novels, I look forward to reading each years winner of the Bram Stoker award for best Horror Novel.  The 2012 recipient, Flesh Eaters by Joe McKinney was actually the third novel in his Dead World series, so before I read the award winner I went back and read both Dead City and Apocalypse of the Dead.  As most horror novels are stand alone I haven’t had to do this level of back-story reading since 2004 when Peter Straub’s In the Night Room won, which required me to read four other novel (two of them award winners and all of them quite enjoyable)

Flesh Eaters works like an unending nightmare – it starts in Houston shortly after the events of one Hurricane and just before it is hit by two progressively worse ones.  As the city reels under the very real-life horrors brought on by such a disaster certain survivors begin to act strange, their eyes clouding over and then suddenly craving the flesh of others.

The novel is a prequel to the previous books, which both mention the devastation which took place in Houston , but give only secondhand accounts of it.  The main character is Police Sergeant Eleanor Norton, who, on top of her duties as a police officer during the storm, is also trying to save her own husband and daughter as well as other survivors she finds along the way.

Although I have to admit I was starting to feel pretty zombied-out by the time I got to this book (having received a zombie-themed calendar last year, I’ve actually read more than a dozen zombie-themed books in the last few months), I found the book worked well, introduced a lot of well developed characters into an increasingly horrible situation and will have me keeping an eye out for other books by the author (but I’ll be taking a break from his zombie titles for a while as I’m flexing my fantasy-genre muscles right now).

Genre Character of the Week: Ed Moore

Over the weekend I read the novel Apocalypse of the Dead by Joe McKinney, it is the second novel in his “Dead World” series, and other than a few mentions of the events and characters from the first novel, it is a stand-alone story.  Following a very large number of people through a zombie apocalypse, the stand outs for me were a young convict name Billy Stine, and this weeks genre character, Ed Moore.

Ed is a retired U.S. Marshall, who at the beginning of the story is living in a retirement community in Florida when a plague of zombies hit the shore, quickly changing the populace into even more zombies through bites and scratches (like the film …28 Days Later the zombies in McKinney’s world are actually humans suffering from a virus, rather than reanimated corpses)  Immediately taking charge of the small group of survivors

The first thing I like about Ed is the concept; usually in zombie stories the elderly are simply victims or would-be victims that our heroes need to save so the idea of a man in his seventies who can hold his own against zombies while still coming across as a real character had a great appeal to me.  The second thing I like about Ed was the fact that he’s an incredibly old school, cowboy type, tipping his hat to ladies when he says hello and rebuking Billy for his foul language around women and children.

As a novel I felt it was a little too busy, the number of significant characters was over a dozen and as we switched from storyline to storyline it often took me a little while to figure out exactly which character was being written about.  A big part of the appeal of Ed is that as a character he was so well written I never had this problem.

I’m currently reading McKinney ’s “Dead World” series as the third novel, The Flesh Eaters, won last years Bram Stoker award for best horror novel, and I wanted the context I would get by reading the entire series. The book was pretty good, unlike Dead City I don’t think I’ll purchase it as the number of characters was a little unwieldy for me, but overall it was a pretty sold zombie apocalypse novel.