Not my cup of tea

Audible recommended this to me when I was on the hunt for Zombie novels. It is not a Zombie novel, but it is "apocalyptic", so I'm not complaining about that. It is close enough to a Zombie novel in style and "feel" that I would have been OK with the purchase, if it weren't for other problems I had with it.

I haven't finished the first book and I doubt I will, so keep that in mind when evaluating how useful my review is.

I generally like the "military Zombie story" sub genre and I have no problem with main characters being soldiers, but I always get very weary when the main character is some special forces superhero. That is usually a red flag when it comes to the overall quality of a novel or a series. What you usually get is this bad ass power fantasy main character barging through the story and all the other characters around him talking about how great he is ad nauseam.

That usually makes the book feel very low brow and often even low I.Q.
I know, I sound like a snooty, arrogant Edgelord now, but as I said, I generally enjoy military heavy Zombie stories, but there are good ones and there are bad ones and the good ones usually don't have Mary Sue type main characters.

With stories like that I'm just never sure whether that is just what the author himself likes and that is just what he can do, or whether he just knowingly panders to a audience he doesn't respect and thinks that is what Zombie type story consumers want.

In this case it isn't even so much the main character being a extreme super hero, it is more the fact that we alternate between him trying to find his way through the apocalypse and his family waiting at home and it is in those long and tedious segments and chapters where we get to join his family talking about what a dedicated soldier and family father he is and how he turned their farm house into a survivalist compound and bla bla bla.

Sorry, but it just isn't good writing when the author tells me what to think about a character instead of just having the character do his thing and then let me as the reader decide for myself whether I like him or not.
"Show, don't tell." is usually a rule of thumb used for movies, but it should apply to novels too.

The way we are introduced to the main character's "good old boy" father by having the main character's wife tell us what a great guy he is, is just extremely ham-fisted and clunky.
The reader knows immediately the guy will die and we are supposed to be sad because we are told he is a great dude.

And speaking of ham-fisted and clunky.... There is a human villain too, which I generally never like because when I consume a Zombie or monster apocalypse story of this kind, I want the Zombies or monsters to be the threat from start to finish. Human villains always just feel like filler to me, like something the author felt he needed to put in there to fill pages and because he doesn't know how to keep things interesting with just the main threat.

This villain here is just weird and not in the way most people reading this might expect. He is this "President of Technology" or something like that manager type who gets confronted by his CEO and CFO about hiding a slush fund for some weird project from them and he just has both of his bosses shot by his security henchman, right there and then, nilly willy and in his own office, as if that were somehow normal and the way you take over a corporation and as if the police wouldn't exist in that world or something.

So because the CEO and CFO are suddenly dead, that means some president runs the company now? What?

It just comes across as silly and childish, like something a 12 year old might write.


The narrator is OK but not great either, I have to say. He sometimes gives a weird, unfitting tone to the character dialogue. For example he sometimes reads stuff in a yelling voice when the character actually doesn't yell at that point.


edit: As I predicted, I didn't make it.
Couldn't take it when the author dragged me back to the little farm on the prairie over and over again to tell me about how the supposedly main character's daughter is a problem child. There is a apocalypse happening but the novel weirdly refuses to tell me about it and is instead boring me with this family business shit that would be tedious and boring even if I were part of that family in real life.

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