Tag Archives: zombies

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Review – Dominion of the Damned (Ebook)

jm bauhaus I’ve been following, reading, and enjoying Jean Marie’s work for a while now. I consider myself a fan and we’re also friends via the usual social media channels. She blends fantasy and romance in a way that I enjoy. When she solicited reviews for this book, I immediately raised my hand. Does this meet my standards? Read on and find out!

Nursing student Hannah Jordan knows things are bad when her mother dies while giving birth to a son. She knows things can’t get much worse when her mother gets back up and tries to have the baby for breakfast. When she’s forced to put her mother down like a rabid animal, only one certainty remains: Hannah will do whatever it takes to stay alive and protect her baby brother.

dominion coverThe only survivors out of a family of survivalists, Hannah and the baby ride out the zombie apocalypse in their family’s backyard bunker, emerging months later to find a world taken over by the newly self-appointed saviors of humanity: a race of vampires hellbent on preventing the extinction of their food supply.

The Goods – Zombie vs. Vampires with humans stuck in the middle? Sign me up! This uses the typical horror tropes well, without abusing them a la Twilight. The romance angle is well written and I enjoy watching the principle love interests falling for each other. Hannah Jordan is the kind of kick ass heroine I think we all need to see more of. She’s strong, but far from a robot. She knows her way around a gun and isn’t afraid to go hand to hand. She’s also smart, though she makes plenty of mistakes of the sort you’d expect from any young person. So, she’s no Mary Sue. The pacing and amount of detail are both solid. JM knows how to keep the story moving, but she doesn’t sacrifice character development. It’s definitely a page turner and literally kept me up until midnight so that I could find out what happened.

The Bads – As much as I enjoyed the book, it’s not without its flaws. Hannah is in her bunker for five months and it seems to me that the world went from normal to post apocalyptic far too quickly. Things happen that probably should have taken longer than five months. When a prisoner is telling her what’s happened since the zombie outbreak, it sounds like everything fell apart too quickly. Speaking of too quick, while I applaud the pacing, there are a few scenes that seem to move the plot along a little too quickly. More time with her settling into life at the camp would have made what happened next a little more believable. By that, I mostly mean the relationships that she builds with the other humans. They go much too fast. In addition, everything at the human camp is a little too clean and nice. Hannah starts off paranoid and justifiably so, but she works through it too quickly.

There’s also something that bugged me about both this and another romance I read recently. People are too nice to each other. I’ll grant you that most of the vampires are evil buggers, but I don’t recall there being an ounce of tension between Hannah and the people she ends up befriending. She does things that should bother her new neighbors and there’s no huge reason for anyone to be so open and trusting. I suppose I’ve just come to think of the post-apocalypse genre as being chock full of anti-social behavior.

Finally, while I found the idea of the solution to the zombie problem to be interesting, it was also a little confusing. How it works is a mystery, as is how it was developed.

None of these by themselves hurt the book that much, but a few answers might be forthcoming in the sequel.

The Verdict I enjoyed this book. The vampires are mostly monsters, though the doctor has an interesting explanation as to why that is. The romance is heartfelt. And the plot and characters worked for me. The flaws pulled me out of the story a few times, but getting back in was never a problem.

I give this book four out of five silver bullets and look forward to the next in this series.

Amazon Link

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Review – West of Dead by Eric Bahle (Ebook)

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This is another one of those books/authors that I found out about through the Twitter-verse. I saw zombies and wild/weird west and I was sold (though this one was another freebie when I picked it up).

Fans of Joe R. Lansdale, Robert Davis, and Adam Millard will love this fast paced tale of the Weird West.

What good is a six-shooter against a horde of the undead?

Nathaniel Caine wants to forget the War and see the frontier, and a trip by stagecoach seems like the perfect way. When the stage pulls into a deserted way station with obvious signs of violence, but a disturbing lack of bodies, he suspects things are going bad. Things go from bad to worse when the passengers fall under attack by people that should be dead, and Caine must call on old skills just to survive. He’ll also need the help of a fellow passenger who knows more than he’s telling if the restless dead are to be put back in the ground.

This book grabbed me from the very beginning. That’s important in a book like this (or perhaps any book really). The action and tension started at a fairly high point within the first few pages. Most of the characters are exactly as deep as they need to be for something like this. There is one character that was a nice surprise, but I won’t spoil said surprise. I don’t think Eric’s breaking really new ground here, but this is pure Saturday afternoon fun.

The thing I appreciate most about this story is that he makes an attempt at least to pay homage to zombieism’s historical roots. These zed heads are a good mix of walkers and their Caribbean ancestors. The latter is mostly for flavor, so it seems to me, but it’s a nice spice.

The writing is good. He kept the pace quick and I was “flipping” pages like mad to see what happened next. The only time I ever stumbled in the reading process was later in the book when he did some abrupt POV shifts. It’s good practice in my opinion to make some kind of hard break when you do that, but it didn’t happen a lot and I picked up and kept right on reading.

This book is now $2.99 at Amazon. The question is, is it worth it? If you want a fun, solid shoot-em up with some scares and a little gore this is the book for you. The only thing cerebral about this are the brains liberally spattered around during the last third.

I give this book four out of five brass cartridges.

Eric’s Site
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Amazon Kindle Link

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Review – Fetidus: The Damned Heir

This week’s review is of Fetidus by James Durham

Synopsis: FETIDUS: The Damned Heir by James Durham is the first sci-fi/horror novel and original music score set in the grim and fetid alleyways of a post-apocalyptic Washington, DC, circa 2034. In this first novel, Art Blanchard, a jaded Washington lobbyist who works for The Foundation for the Ethical Treatment of the Innocently Damned, Undead and Supernatural (FETIDUS), takes up the blackmail case of a mysterious woman, which leads him on a twisted adventure filled with noir-humor, suspense and horror.

Production: James does audio production for a living. He’s also a musician and composer. It shows in every bit of this podcast. He won a Parsec for it and it was deserved, even though at the time he won it, it had not yet finished. Fetidus seems not so much produced as sculpted. The music and sound effects accentuated every bit of the story.

Grade: A+

Cast: Fetidus uses a full voice cast. Most of the people involved are pros, possibly all. As such, they do a marvelous job with their various roles.

Grade: A+

Story: This is a modern noir. There’s a healthy dose of violence and sex, though the former is more explicit than the latter. There’s a lot going on here and in that sense it’s perhaps more complicated than its cinematic predecessors. Of course he injected vampires, zombies, and a horrific apocalypse into it as well. Taken all together there are times when it almost seems like too much. It’s easy to get overloaded with plot threads in addition to the world building that he’s done here. If you’re looking for a straight forward romp, this ain’t it. It also gets really, REALLY dark and there are times where the violence is a bit too much for my taste.

Grade: B+

Verdict: I heartily endorse this podcast. In case it’s not obvious I think it’s one of the top ones out there and it earned the Parsec. Odin rightly dinged it for it’s release schedule, since it did go through a reboot. There are good reasons for that that I won’t go into since they’re immaterial now. You as a new listener have the benefit of all the episodes being out there for your consumption. If you’re into noir and zombies I’m frankly surprised you haven’t already listened to it!

Grade: Solid A