The stupidest angel - Christopher Moore

The stupidest angel: a heartwarming tale of Christmas terror - Moore, Christopher

Summary: When a boy witnesses the murder of a portly, Scrooge-like real-estate developer, he believes the victim is Santa Claus and wishes for the man's recovery, and when the haphazard angel, Raziel, grants the wish, unexpected occurrences result.


BookPage Reviews
A dose of holiday jeer
Most Christmas novels suffer from an overabundance of sweetness or a glut of requisite miracle making. Not Christopher Moore's The Stupidest Angel. In fact, Moore starts off with a tongue-in-cheek warning claiming it may not be the best gift for the grandmother or child on your list. Then again, if your intended isn't afraid of satiric one-liners, twisted small-town goings-on and zombies intent on Christmas cheer, then maybe Moore's latest is the best present out there. In fact, it's more of an anti-Christmas story than anything else, meaning he does a good job of sending up the genre, shaking up all that is normally accepted—heavenly angels, red-cheeked children, eggnog by the fire—yet still creating a place and a cast of characters that is entirely festive and spirit-filled. Not for the faint of heart, The Stupidest Angel is wild in its telling (stoner lawmen, Vicodin-drenched fruitcake) and fantastical in tone (the cemetery dead trade barbs) but most definitely original and likely to join Moore's other books on the list of cult favorites. Copyright 2004 BookPage Reviews.

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Patient Zero - Jonathan Maberry

Patient Zero - Maberry, Jonathan

Summary: Recruited by the Department of Military Sciences, detective Joe Ledger finds himself in the battle of his life when he discovers that his mission is to stop a group of terrorist who possess a bio-weapon that can turn people into zombies upon its release.




Kirkus Reviews
A dark, chilling and funny thriller about zombies from Maberry (Zombie CSU: The Forensics of the Living Dead, 2008, etc.). Joe Ledger, a Baltimore cop on leave after killing a suspected terrorist during a raid on a warehouse, just wanted to spend a day girl-watching at the beach. So when four FBI agents corner him as he's getting into his car and take him on a mandatory ride in their black SUV, he's a little miffed, especially since he's about to leave the department and join their ranks at Quantico. But any negative emotion he feels about being snatched up is soon dwarfed by what goes through his head when Mr. Church, head of the top secret Department of Military Sciences, locks him in a room a short time later and forces him to kill the very same terrorist he shot to death less than a week before. The whole thing is a recruiting test, and after Joe, an Army veteran and martial-arts expert, dispatches the terrorist—again—without hesitation, Church invites him to join the DMS, a government organization created to battle threats that fall outside the purview of other government organizations. Threats from zombie terrorists, for instance. Soon, Joe is leading a tactical team, as he and the rest of the DMS try to stop terrorist El Mujahid, his mad-scientist bride Amirah and Sebastian Gualt, their wealthy Western backer, from unleashing a plague that turns regular people, soldiers and terrorists alike into bloodthirsty, infectious zombies. The book is as fun and funny as it is chilling and thrill-packed. Joe is a fantastic character, full of compassion, real vulnerabilities and a deliciously dark sense of humor. An immensely entertaining package.

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To Sail a Darkling Sea - John Ringo

To Sail a Darkling Sea - Ringo, John

Summary: With human civilization annihilated by a biological zombie plague, a rag tag fleet of yachts and freighters known as Wolf Squadron scours the Atlantic, searching for survivors. Within every abandoned liner and carrier lurks a potential horde of zombies but also holds the flickering hope of survivors. Now Wolf Squadron must clear the assault carrier USS Iwo Jima of infected before the trapped Marines and sailors succumb to starvation.


Booklist Reviews
In Under a Graveyard Sky (2013), Ringo introduced Steve Smith, an Australian ex-paratrooper; his wife, Stacey; and their teenage daughters, Sophia and Faith. After the zombie apocalypse, the family fled New York in a boat loaded with supplies and weaponry. Their initial plan was to find a place to hole up until the man-made plague died out, but soon they sought other vessels and set about rescuing their survivors (after first "clearing" the boats of the infected). Now the makeshift flotilla, operating with the cooperation of what remains of the U.S. government, has become a sort of oceangoing city. And the mission has grown in scope: along with clearing any vessels the flotilla encounters, Smith and his fellow sailors will attempt to clear small towns, making their way to Guantanamo Bay, where they will use the medical facilities to begin manufacturing a vaccine. Not only has Ringo found a mostly unexplored corner of the zombie landscape, he's using the zombie frame to tackle a broader theme: the collapse and rebirth of civilization. The zombie scenes are exciting, sure, but it's the human story that keeps us involved. A fine series.

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The Girl With All the Gifts - M. R. Carey

The Girl With All the Gifts - Carey, M. R.

Summary: Not every gift is a blessing. Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant Parks keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don't like her. She jokes that she won't bite. But they don't laugh. Melanie is a very special girl. Emotionally charged and gripping from beginning to end.


Kirkus Reviews
Sgt. Parks, Pvt. Gallagher, Miss Justineau and Dr. Caldwell flee an English military camp, a scientific site for the study of "hungries," zombielike creatures who feast on flesh, human or otherwise. These once-humans are essentially "fungal colonies animating human bodies." After junkers—anarchic survivalists—use hungries to breach the camp's elaborate wire fortifications, the four survivors head for Beacon, a giant refuge south of London where uninfected citizens have retreated over the past two decades, bringing along one of the study subjects, 10-year-old Melanie, a second-generation hungry. Like others of her generation, Melanie possesses superhuman strength and a superb intellect, and she can reason and communicate. Dr. Caldwell had planned to dissect Melanie's brain, but Miss Justineau thinks Melanie is capable of empathy and human interaction, which might make her a bridge between humans and hungries. Their philosophical dispute continues in parallel to a survival trek much like the one in McCarthy's On the Road. The four either kill or hide from junkers and hungries (which are animated by noise, movement and human odors). The characters are somewhat clichéd—Parks, rugged veteran with an empathetic core; Gallagher, rube private and perfect victim; Caldwell, coldhearted objectivist ever focused on prying open Melanie’s skull. It may be Melanie's role to lead second-generation hungries in a revival of civilization, which in this imaginative, ominous assessment of our world and its fate, offers cold comfort. One of the more imaginative and ingenious additions to the dystopian canon.

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Warm bodies - Isaac Marion

Warm bodies - Marion, Isaac

Summary: Alienated from his fellow zombies because of his dislike of having to kill humans and his enjoyment of Sinatra music, "R" meets a living girl who sharply contrasts with his cold and dreary world and whom he resolves to protect in spite of her delicious appearance.


Kirkus Reviews

A jubilant story about two star-crossed lovers, one of them dead and hungry for more than love.

Debut novelist Marion hits the pulse of the Twilight crowd with this morbidly romantic look at how affection really feels when your heart beats no more. "I am dead, but it's not so bad," says our zombie narrator, by way of introduction. "I've learned to live with it. This is "R," so named because it's all he can remember. But this is no Team Edward sob story. R really is a zombie, carrying the pink brains of his victims back to his communal lair for a snack. But one day, R chomps down on Perry Kelvin, a teenager whose sole affection is for his girlfriend, Julie. R begins absorbing Perry's memories, which in turn inspire him not to treat Julie like a bucket of KFC. And so the weirdest courting in the history of literature begins, as R and Julie spend time together prowling food courts and half-destroyed 747s. Julie, who could have been a simplistic mechanism to drive the book's plot, turns out to be its most inspired character, inhabiting that odd space between fear and curiosity. "Maybe you're not such a monster, Mr. Zombie," she admits at one point. "I mean, anyone who appreciates a good beer is halfway okay in my book." R begins to change, redeveloping his ability to communicate, and noticing a physical transformation to accompany his emotional awakening. But the path of true love never runs smooth, and the unlikely duo soon find themselves caught between R's ravenous companions and Julie's soldier father.

Originally self-published, this DIY success story is already slated for a film adaptation, making these quixotic lovers the grateful dead indeed.


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This book is full of spiders - David Wong

This book is full of spiders: seriously, dude, don't touch it - Wong, David

Summary: David and John become embroiled in a new set of horrific but absurd challenges when movie-induced zombie phobia enables a nefarious shape-shifter race to take over the world. - (Baker & Taylor)


Booklist Reviews
Wong—in reality Cracked.com writer Jason Pargin—follows up his comic horror novel John Dies at the End (2009) with this wildly out-there sequel. Best friends John and Dave live in a smallish town that seems to suffer from a surfeit of supernatural and suspicious events. The story begins with a local cop being, um, intruded upon by a spiderish creature that turns its victim into, um, a zombie-like individual, and it gets a whole lot weirder from there. Wong, the book's first-person narrator and also one of its central characters (John being "John Cheese," a fellow Cracked.com contributor) focuses mainly on the laughs and the strange goings-on, but there's a very interesting idea here: What if the current pop-culture zombie mania could lead to a pseudo-zombie apocalypse? What if, in other words, enough people believe in something to turn it into reality? And how do a couple of slacker dudes defeat a creature that, technically, doesn't even exist? Full of laughs and goofiness, the book should definitely appeal to fans of John Dies at the End and to readers of comic horror fiction in general (especially, it should be noted, fans of British novelist Tom Holt, who will be familiar with the same sort of whimsy and ordinary-guy-in-extraordinary-situation environment.) Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.

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The walking dead - Robert Kirkman

The walking dead - Kirkman, Robert

Summary: "An epidemic of apocalyptic proportions has swept the globe causing the dead to rise and feed on the living. In a matter of months society has crumbled-- no government, no grocery stores, no mail delivery, no cable TV. In a world ruled by the dead, we are forced to finally start living"--P. [4] of cover.

Read Review from "No Flying, No Tights"

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Handling the undead - John Ajvide Lindqvist

Handling the undead - Ajvide Lindqvist, John

Summary: Mayhem in the Stockholm power grid gives way to the rise of countless zombies, sparking delight in a grandfather who hopes for his grandson's return and horror in a husband who witnesses disturbing changes in his revived wife.



Publishers Weekly Reviews
Swedish horror author Lindqvist moves from vampires (Let the Right One In) to zombies in this gripping, subtle tale. Stockholm is overtaken by the undead after a period of strange weather, and the uprising has surprising consequences for several people, including David, a comedian whose dead wife comes back to life; self-harming psychic teenagers Flora and Elvy; and journalist Gustav Mahler, whose only hope of saving his daughter and himself from grief lies in exhuming his young grandson and hoping the boy will be reanimated. Lindqvist's character-driven narrative is at times slow and confusing, but pop culture references keep the story relevant and interesting. This intelligent look into the psychological side of the undead will entice longtime zombie fans eager for a subversive examination of some of the horror genre's most recognizable monsters. (Sept.)

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World War Z; an oral history of the zombie war - Max Brooks

World War Z; an oral history of the zombie war - Brooks, Max

Summary: World War Z is a fictional account of a worldwide outbreak of the living dead in the near future. WWZ is done in an interview-style format with each chapter consisting of first-person interviews of individuals who lived through the Zombie War from its initial outbreak to it's final battles and mop-up operations.

Booklist Reviews
"The Crisis" nearly wiped out humanity. Brooks (son of Mel Brooks and author of The Zombie Survival Guide, 2003) has taken it upon himself to document the "first hand" experiences and testimonies of those lucky to survive 10 years after the fictitious zombie war. Like a horror fan's version of Studs Terkel's The Good War (1984), the "historical account" format gives Brooks room to explore the zombie plague from numerous different views and characters. In a deadpan voice, Brooks exhaustively details zombie incidents from isolated attacks to full-scale military combat: "what if the enemy can't be shocked and awed? Not just won't, but biologically can't!" With the exception of a weak BAT-21 story in the second act, the "interviews" and personal accounts capture the universal fear of the collapse of society--a living nightmare in which anyone can become a mindless, insatiable predator at a moment's notice. Alas, Brad Pitt's production company has purchased the film rights to the book--while it does have a chronological element, it's more similar to a collection of short stories: it would make for an excellent 24-style TV series or an animated serial. Regardless, horror fans won't be disappointed: like George Romero's Dead trilogy, World War Z is another milestone in the zombie mythos. ((Reviewed August 2006)) Copyright 2006 Booklist Reviews.

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