Book Review: Brian Keene - City of the Dead [3 of 5]
Ok so, I just finished the book. It wasn't exactly Shakespeare but it wasn't bad either.
If you plan to check it out, get the FIRST book first. It's called 'The Rising' [Amazon][Wikipedia][B&N][Borders]. I got the wrong book first and it turned out to be the second in the pair. I'm hoping once I read the first book everything going on will make sense.
Keene doesn't seem to believe in the Exposition Fairie. This book just sort of drops you in the middle of the shit, like you just rappelled out of a helo into Somalia during a firefight. While that's good for establishing action and keeping up a frenetic pace it's not good for having much of an idea what the fuck is going on.
I assume that perhaps he goes into possible causes in the first book and maybe fleshes out the characters a bit. To be honest, they were pretty much front to back two dimensional and given that I hadn't spent any time with them previously I found that until about 3/4ths of the way through the book I didn't give a flying fuck what happened to them.
You don't really get enough of an explanation to understand what's going on until at least a third of the way into the book either. Granted that's not Keene's fault that I grabbed the second book from the Library rather than the first.
If you want a good synopsis click on the Wikipedia link above otherwise you're on your own.
Basically, there's a Zompocolypse. Keene's take on it is that God created the infinite multiverse and populated it with many inhabited worlds. But apparently some of God's angels fell and followed 'Morningstar' (Lucifer) into hell. They talk about blood and sorcery keeping them there, but never really explain what they mean by that. There are also established rules that they must follow, presumably laid down by God or somebody. Somehow (and I say somehow because I have no idea how, maybe it's in the first book), they start escaping by possessing the recently deceased. The first group of demons is lead by a demon named Ob, and they can possess reptiles, amphibians, birds, humans and other mammals after their deaths. These creatures can be dispatched by destroying the brain just like in classic zombies but that is where the similarity ends. If you want a good depiction of what Keene's putting forth watch Return of the Living Dead and make the zombies demon possessed corpses - or read about the Harrowed in Deadlands.
The zombies are not the original person though the demon inside has full access to the host's collected memories and skills. If a demon possesses a dead special forces guy he knows the location of weaponry, martial arts, security codes and so forth. Needless to say these critters make seriously formidable opponents. Especially since they don't need to bite you - or even touch you. When you die your spirit/soul/animus/whatever is displaced by one of these creatures. There swarms of birds and rats scouring the city as well as human corrupted. If you 'kill' a zombie, the demon is merely thrown out of the body and heads off to wait in line to get a new one. They claim to be more plentiful than the stars and being forcibly discorporated is more of an annoyance to them than anything. Greaaaat. One zombie even reports to the boss zombie that China and India have already been scoured. Wow that must have been messed up and nightmarish. Freaky, messed up demons chasing people around and doing freaky demonic things to them? Almost three billion people live in those two countries alone. You'd think it'd get more than a two sentence mention.
There are apparently three groups of demons, the first wave which create zombies as noted. The second wave which, get this, possess plants. Yes, zombie grass. But don't worry that little bit of ridiculousness is only mentioned a few times throughout the book and only actually occurs at the end. There is also a third group which sound a lot like the Hellementals from Warcraft and World of Warcraft - they burn the world with each step they take. But these other groups cannot be released from the Void until all humans and a large percentage of other life has been corrupted. The whole purpose of the zombies, it seems, is to piss off 'The Creator' more than anything.
Throughout the book there is a heavy disdain for rational thought and logic - with the demons and even the text stating that because of rationality and science humans have lost the only defense against these creatures. It almost felt like I was reading a Left Behind novel though perhaps toned down enough to make me not chuck it across the room in annoyance. Seemed like anybody who's not a godbot is automatically a pervert, murderer or some other miscreant. The doctor who has sex with a captive zombie is particularly grotty.....and what the hell was up with all the people masturbating? Did Keene get his knuckles cracked with a ruler as a kid or something? There are least four or five people in the book pleasuring themselves. I'm all for sex in books - we're humans after all. But a few instances were particularly whacked out and almost seemed like he threw it in because he needed some filler. It leaves you thinking "Another person masturbating? What the hell is this here for?"
The characters, even the main characters, were largely two dimensional though, perhaps this is because anything that might have endeared you to them might have occurred in the first book. I found that it wasn't until the last part of the book that I actually started to give a damn what happened to them. Keene certainly wasn't shy about killing them off in gory ways - but if you want people to see your NPC's as something other than another puddle of pulp in the middle of a sea of gore you need to give them some depth. It didn't really seem like it was there to me which I found a little disappointing. It was more like watching redshirts in TOS than anything. "Oh look, Barry just got killed..didn't he just introduce Barry two pages ago?"
If there's one thing Keene does really well in this book it's action sequences. Like I said he basically dumps you in the thick of things and leaves you to figure out what the hell is going on. The demons take particular delight in dispatching humans in bloody, disgusting, painful ways many times violating them for the fun of it and taking the time to play with their prey like cats hunting mice. Keene describes these encounters in gruesome detail. Once Ob, their boss, shows up they stop using Zerg strategy and start bringing real force to bear. Imagine zombies driving tanks down NYC streets and using machine guns, cars and even attack helicopters to chase you around. Not that they needed this, mind you, since they had a veritable carpet of NYC vermin to use as a creeping blight to destroy everything in their path. Ob orders them to search the entirety of the city and kill everything they find. They do their job with relish.
Eventually though, you start running out of people which is the whole point of the exercise. It isn't so much Divine retribution like some Book of Revelation smackdown as it is someone shaking up an ant farm like it was an Etch a Sketch. The last remnants of humanity end up held up in a skyscraper in New York owned by some Bill Gates type guy who everyone seems to know - but you don't hear about until over halfway through the book. He built the thing to withstand 9/11 style attacks and basically anything the zombies can throw is ineffective but the people can't leave either. Right up until Ob calls for 'all' of the undead on the continent to converge on New York. Zoinks!
The ending is by far probably one of the better bits of the book. It's an ending I can respect and probably very similar to the way I would write it (mostly) . I won't go into more detail than that. I'd comment more but I don't want to give anything away in case you want to read it.
All in all, it's not a bad book. I give it 3 of 5 'didn't sucks'. If you're into the Zombie or horror genres it's worth a read and if you're in Maryland at least the library will have it back shortly.