You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
wombat929 's review for:
Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End
by Manel Loureiro
When the zombie disease spreads throughout the world, a lawyer in Spain finds himself trapped in his home, with just a cat and his blog (later, his journal) to keep him company. As society falls apart, our protagonist learns to deal with the dead, working his way across the zombie-infested landscape, looking for a place to hide from the plague. Written in an epistolary style, Loureiro's zombie novel is a decent addition to the genre, but it has very little new to offer. A few thoughts:
- Loureiro's zombies follow the same rules as Max Brooks' zombies, and this could very well be subtitled "a novel of World War Z."
- Unlike most zombie novels, the narrator never really gets very good at killing zombies. He makes it sound very difficult, and dangerous every time. The only effective tool he has is his spear gun, and he keeps having to leave the spears for fear of infection or lack of time to retrieve them.
- The zombies in the novel are a weird mix of overwhelming and stupid. I like his assertion that they can sense life, more than just see or smell it (though before we really get into that part of it, we've finished the novel).
- One lesson we might learn from this is the way governments would likely exacerbate a zombie outbreak by refusing to share key information about what they are and how to stop them. One imagines that had the first government to encounter the outbreak properly shared the techniques for dealing with it, there would have been no novel to write.
- Of course, Mira Grant's FEED imagines that many people in our world would be saved because we've seen zombie movies and would know what to do. Loureiro fails to address this question, putting Apocalypse Z in a nearby alternate universe where no zombie movies exist.
Overall, Loureiro's Apocalypse Z is an amusing tale, but one wholly within its genre, bending few rules and breaking none. If you haven't read very many zombie novels, it might feel like a fresh story, but for the more experienced reader, you should give it a miss.
- Loureiro's zombies follow the same rules as Max Brooks' zombies, and this could very well be subtitled "a novel of World War Z."
- Unlike most zombie novels, the narrator never really gets very good at killing zombies. He makes it sound very difficult, and dangerous every time. The only effective tool he has is his spear gun, and he keeps having to leave the spears for fear of infection or lack of time to retrieve them.
- The zombies in the novel are a weird mix of overwhelming and stupid. I like his assertion that they can sense life, more than just see or smell it (though before we really get into that part of it, we've finished the novel).
- One lesson we might learn from this is the way governments would likely exacerbate a zombie outbreak by refusing to share key information about what they are and how to stop them. One imagines that had the first government to encounter the outbreak properly shared the techniques for dealing with it, there would have been no novel to write.
- Of course, Mira Grant's FEED imagines that many people in our world would be saved because we've seen zombie movies and would know what to do. Loureiro fails to address this question, putting Apocalypse Z in a nearby alternate universe where no zombie movies exist.
Overall, Loureiro's Apocalypse Z is an amusing tale, but one wholly within its genre, bending few rules and breaking none. If you haven't read very many zombie novels, it might feel like a fresh story, but for the more experienced reader, you should give it a miss.