A review by sealsea88
Wanderers by Chuck Wendig

adventurous challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

1.5

I will preface this by saying this made my Worst Book List - of which I think there's been maybe 5 in my 30+ years of life. This book tried to be too many things and because it tried to be too much, it failed to be the most important thing which is good. I typically would have given up on a book of this length but it held promise up until the last 250ish pages. If you're reading this and aren't at that threshold yet, bail out now.

I did enjoy that this was a twist on the traditional zombie trope, the characters in the novel are referred to as the Walkers, and they appear to be sleepwalking. Things begin small, just a few walkers, but as they begin walking westward more and more Walkers join and our character list begins to swell.

If you're looking for an end of the world kind of book, Justin Cronin's The Passage does end of the world way better, and leaves you with characters that you actually care about. I barely remember the names of the main characters in this novel because the cast list was so swollen by the end. 

This book tried to be a commentary on the Trump Presidency (for perspective I read this in March of 2021), a pandemic story/mystery of the start of the disease, a HAL 2001: A Space Odyssey-machine-takes-over robot horror story, and the world ends and we start over all in one book that wasn't 1,000 pages. You cannot do justice to all of those storylines in just 782 pages (paperback version). This book also included a rape scene which I feel was used solely for shock value (in the story it is used as a means of torture, degradation, and control) which would have been enough to make my WBL.(/spoiler>


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