Apocalypse

Zombie Fallout by Mark Tufo
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Before I get started, I should admit that I could only make it halfway through this book because it was so bad, so I’m only reviewing the first half. However, I doubt the second half could have done anything to redeem what I’d already endured.

I really can’t understand all the good reviews of this book. The writing was horrible… inconsistent, juvenile in many cases, and packed full of grammatical errors. There were cultural references that were simply wrong… saying that the American Express motto was “Don’t go anywhere without it.” Really?

The author scattered in a selection of big words every now and then that were completely out of character with the rest of the writing. They weren’t unknown words (like “lugubrious”), but it made it appear as though he was stuck for a word and quickly thumbed through a thesaurus to grab a flashy adjective. It was simply distracting.

The main character was, in turn, smart then stupid then brave then a coward then loving then antagonistic… no consistency. The wife has absolutely no good qualities. It was just bad, bad, bad.

The writing aside, even the zombie part of the story didn’t make sense. One hour after things went spiraling into zombie apocalypse, there were rotting, maggot-ridden corpses? How does that work? The main character, even though he supposedly knew about zombies (from fiction) and had been sort of looking forward to the zombie apocalypse, didn’t seem to know to shoot them in the head. Wait… actually, he did mention that you needed to destroy the brain, but then he would waste entire clips of M16 ammo spraying the body of a single zombie… without killing it.

It was hard enough to stomach the bad writing and really bad characterizations, but then showing no respect for the reader’s ability to suspend disbelief took it over the top and into the land of discarded books.

I tried, though. I really tried.