What I Read - January, 2009 - Part 2

Day by Day Armageddon - J.L. Bourne - DON'T READ

I'll admit that I'm a sucker for a good zombie novel. Now if only I could find one! (I'll be here all week, tip your servers). Probably the only zombie novels that I've read that werereally worth reading were World War Z by Max Brooks and Rising by Brian Keene

This book by J.L. Bourne, is I believe essentially the cobbled together postings from his blog. It's supposed to be the day by day journal of a survivor during the zombie apocalypse. I imagine that would be used as an excuse for how poorly written it is. But it's not a very good excuse. There are multiple extremely distracting editing errors and mis-spellings, and the author/main character is obsessed with making sure that everyone knows that he knows about guns. We are treated to an explanation of how he only loads his 30-round magazines with 29 rounds etc. etc.

Even though it's written from the first person perspective, you really have no idea who this cardboard cut-out is and the motivations for doing, well anything, simply aren't believable. It frankly falls into the trope of needing something to happen to move the action along (think the dog delivering food to the gun shop owner in the Dawn of the Dead remake). In this (presumably) self-published novel, the protaganist decides to leave his house because... I'm not sure, he's bored?

At any rate, even if you like zombie novels, avoid this one.