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A review by notyourdad
Dead City by Joe McKinney
1.0
I thought a long time over whether I was going to bother to review this book or not, but here we are.
I'll start this review off by saying that writing a good zombie book is hard to do. I'm an avid zombie fanatic, so I was willing to give this book some grace. However. I really struggled to get into this book. It was written in the first person POV, so you don't get a lot of information about the zombie outbreak itself. Nothing about how it started, or where it started. That's fine. I can forgive that. Like I said, zombie books are hard to write, especially from the first person POV. I just found the vagueness to be really distracting because instead of following whatever Eddie was doing at the time, I was thinking about the million questions I had about the zombies.
The next gripe I have with this book is the lack of character development. I mean, I spent 288 pages with Eddie and I feel like he didn't change at all. He's a bored cop with a shrill wife and baby at home at the beginning of the book and the only thing that changes is that he starts fighting zombies. Yawn. I also didn't care for how the only 3 female characters in the entire book were represented as vapid, useless "females." This definitely did not pass the Bechdel Test.
The last problem I have with this book, and honestly the biggest reason this got only 1 star was the fact that Eddie is just a bad cop. He on multiple occasions references ways in which he would abuse his powers as a cop before the zombies showed up. At one point he is talking to a survivor who doesn't care for the police and Eddie alludes to putting people like him in jail for a night for looking at him wrong. I mean, come on. That is just blatant abuse of police power. And that wasn't even the only time it happens. I just can't condone that kind of behavior, especially in a fictional character that I'm supposed to be rooting for.
I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone. It was boring and the entire time I was reading it I was counting the pages until the end.
I'll start this review off by saying that writing a good zombie book is hard to do. I'm an avid zombie fanatic, so I was willing to give this book some grace. However. I really struggled to get into this book. It was written in the first person POV, so you don't get a lot of information about the zombie outbreak itself. Nothing about how it started, or where it started. That's fine. I can forgive that. Like I said, zombie books are hard to write, especially from the first person POV. I just found the vagueness to be really distracting because instead of following whatever Eddie was doing at the time, I was thinking about the million questions I had about the zombies.
The next gripe I have with this book is the lack of character development. I mean, I spent 288 pages with Eddie and I feel like he didn't change at all. He's a bored cop with a shrill wife and baby at home at the beginning of the book and the only thing that changes is that he starts fighting zombies. Yawn. I also didn't care for how the only 3 female characters in the entire book were represented as vapid, useless "females." This definitely did not pass the Bechdel Test.
The last problem I have with this book, and honestly the biggest reason this got only 1 star was the fact that Eddie is just a bad cop. He on multiple occasions references ways in which he would abuse his powers as a cop before the zombies showed up. At one point he is talking to a survivor who doesn't care for the police and Eddie alludes to putting people like him in jail for a night for looking at him wrong. I mean, come on. That is just blatant abuse of police power. And that wasn't even the only time it happens. I just can't condone that kind of behavior, especially in a fictional character that I'm supposed to be rooting for.
I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone. It was boring and the entire time I was reading it I was counting the pages until the end.