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A review by thomasroche
Dead Earth: The Green Dawn by David T. Wilbanks, Mark Justice
3.0
As with one other recent zombie book I've read, this zombie contagion has to do with some kind of particle physics experiment gone wrong, but in this case it appears to also be a contagion. The result is an army of the dead, so while it starts on a Romero-style note, it ends closer to Sam Raimi's Army of Darkness or [b:City of the Dead by Brian Keene], with an alien inteligence controlling the dead. I tend to prefer the more ambiguous forms of zombie contagion that may have an origin, but don't have a mind of their own. I wasn't clear at the end of this book which direction the concept was going to go, but it seemed likely it would become an all-out shooting war between human survivors and a demonic alien presence controlling the dead.
My other beef with it is that it's set in the future and I don't know why. Nothing about the book feels like the future, except the brief mention of a solar car, and the general idea that there would be a quantum physics string theory experiment that opened a portal to another world. Which is fine...but it could have been contemporary. Briefly, one character is mentioned as having been a little girl on September 11, 2001. That's the only other time that it's really established in story terms that this is the future, and I didn't see the point of it. Granted, there doesn't have to be a "point" to everything in a story, but it just felt distracting, especially since chapters start with the date, and I kept thinking, "Why the hell is it 2048? This could be happening tomorrow." It made it feel less immediate and more remote, and as a result it was slightly less scary to me. My school of storytelling is the stripped-down style, where if something doesn't have a reason to be there, it shouldn't be...generally speaking, I feel like if something's in the future it should transport me to the future. Not that it's my book to write, so take it with a grain of salt.
With that complaint deep-sixed: it's certainly a readable enough novel, and I enjoyed it a fair amount. The style was fluid enough -- ultimately, I think moreso than the other recent zombie novel I read, [b:The Crossing by Bryon Morrigan], though I think the latter had more potential for originality.
I've seen plenty of horror novels with small-town sherrif protagonists, spunky diner waitresses, etc, and the zombie concepts were not stunningly original. But I did feel engaged with the characters and situations, and the action is vividly enough described.
Warning: it's clearly a setup for a sort of zombie survival series, and there's no question at the end that it's an incomplete story without the rest of the books in the series. It's not a standalone.
Overall, it may not be a stunningly original book, but I enjoyed reading it.
If you like zombies and you're not a zombie purist, then you'll probably enjoy it as much as I did.
My other beef with it is that it's set in the future and I don't know why. Nothing about the book feels like the future, except the brief mention of a solar car, and the general idea that there would be a quantum physics string theory experiment that opened a portal to another world. Which is fine...but it could have been contemporary. Briefly, one character is mentioned as having been a little girl on September 11, 2001. That's the only other time that it's really established in story terms that this is the future, and I didn't see the point of it. Granted, there doesn't have to be a "point" to everything in a story, but it just felt distracting, especially since chapters start with the date, and I kept thinking, "Why the hell is it 2048? This could be happening tomorrow." It made it feel less immediate and more remote, and as a result it was slightly less scary to me. My school of storytelling is the stripped-down style, where if something doesn't have a reason to be there, it shouldn't be...generally speaking, I feel like if something's in the future it should transport me to the future. Not that it's my book to write, so take it with a grain of salt.
With that complaint deep-sixed: it's certainly a readable enough novel, and I enjoyed it a fair amount. The style was fluid enough -- ultimately, I think moreso than the other recent zombie novel I read, [b:The Crossing by Bryon Morrigan], though I think the latter had more potential for originality.
I've seen plenty of horror novels with small-town sherrif protagonists, spunky diner waitresses, etc, and the zombie concepts were not stunningly original. But I did feel engaged with the characters and situations, and the action is vividly enough described.
Warning: it's clearly a setup for a sort of zombie survival series, and there's no question at the end that it's an incomplete story without the rest of the books in the series. It's not a standalone.
Overall, it may not be a stunningly original book, but I enjoyed reading it.
If you like zombies and you're not a zombie purist, then you'll probably enjoy it as much as I did.