The Infects Review

The Eulogy (From the Publisher): 
Seventeen-year-old Nero is stuck in the wilderness with a bunch of other juvenile delinquents on an “Inward Trek.” As if that weren't bad enough, his counselors have turned into flesh-eating maniacs overnight and are now chowing down on his fellow miscreants. As in any classic monster flick worth its salted popcorn, plentiful carnage sends survivors rabbiting into the woods while the mindless horde of “infects” shambles, moans, and drools behind. Of course, these kids have seen zombie movies. They generate “Zombie Rules” almost as quickly as cheeky remarks, but attitude alone can’t keep the biters back.

Serving up a cast of irreverent, slightly twisted characters, an unexpected villain, and an ending you won’t see coming, here is a savvy tale that that’s a delight to read—whether you’re a rabid zombie fan or freshly bitten—and an incisive commentary on the evil that lurks within each of us.

The Epitaph (In a Nutshell): A teen zombie comedy that tries to be ambitious with style, but ultimately becomes annoying.

Review - The Fury

The Eulogy (From the Publisher): Cal, Brick and Daisy are three ordinary teenagers whose lives suddenly take a terrifying turn for the worst. They begin to trigger a reaction in everybody they meet, one that makes friends and strangers alike turn rabid whenever they are close. One that makes people want to tear them to pieces
Cal and the other victims of the Fury – the ones that survive – manage to locate each other. But just when they think they have found a safe place to hide from the world, some of them begin to change...
They must fight to uncover the truth about the Fury before it's too late. But it is a truth that will destroy everything they know about life and death

The Epitaph (In a Nutshell): A brilliant epic in the same vein as Michael Grant's Gone and Charlie Higson's The Enemy.

Check out my other review of The Fury here.

Dearly Departed,

We are gathered here today to discuss The Fury, by Alexander Gordon Smith. I'm sitting here stuck for words because I really don't know where to begin… okay, here: this book is amazing. It really, really is. There are just so many good things about it that I want to say at once, which might make for a bit of a confusing review, so I'll start on what I loved most about it - the characters.

Smith has masterfully created the characters of Brick, Daisy, Cal (and others) whose lives have been disrupted by the fact that everybody wants them dead. What I found so clever about this scenario is that these characters would never have got along under normal circumstances: you have Brick, the misunderstood big kid who has 'one of those faces' you take an instant dislike to; Cal the a sports star beloved by all who isn't used to anyone not liking him, let alone hating him; and then there's Daisy, who is young and naïve, yet incredibly wise and calm at the same time. Normally they wouldn't have chosen to be friends, but now that the whole world has turned against them, they have no choice, and it's in these stressful moments of forced interaction that the characters' personalities really shine. 

I was watching Cloverfield the other night, and while I liked the setup, I quickly grew bored by the characters. They were stereotypical horror fodder, and they made bad decisions. In an effort to make the characters appeal to everyone, the filmmakers made them too generic. By the end, I was cheering as each of them fell. The Fury is like the complete opposite of this - I genuinely liked all of the characters, and they were all perfectly brought to life on the page to the point where I was really worried about the fate of one of the main characters in particular, and found myself thinking that if something happened to this character, I was going to have to write an angry letter to Smith. I was even cheering for the characters who weren't typically 'good guys' because I understood where they were coming from and I agreed with their motives.

The other thing that The Fury mastered was the scary monster. I'm not going to ruin anything here, but this puts such an interesting spin on our pre-existing notions of a particular concept. This should come as no surprise to those who have read Smith's Escape From Furnace series, which introduce the reader to some fantastically monstrous bad guys. There are two particular scenes in The Fury that are terrifying - possibly some of the most unsettling I've ever read. The skill in this comes from Smith's writing, and his ability to paint a very vivid picture without ever overwriting it.

Last week in the bookshop I was asked to recommend something to a boy who had read all of Michael Grant's Gone series. I started to recommend his other series, BZRK, when I stopped mid-sentence, picked up a copy of The Fury and shoved it in his hands, while commanding him to 'Buy this one. Now.' Maybe it was the brilliant cover, maybe he was afraid of me, but he did, and I know he won't be disappointed. While it's inevitable that The Fury will get compared to other horror tomes like Grant's and Charlie Higson's The Enemy, I think Smith's latest novel will attract its own Grant-esque army of followers because it's so damned good.

Buy it NOW!

Alexander Gordon Smith's Website

The Fury on Goodreads

Review - The Fear by Charlie Higson

The Eulogy (From the Publisher):
HE DOESN'T KNOW IT, BUT DOGNUT IS ABOUT TO SET OFF A CHAIN OF EVENTS THAT WILL AFFECT EVERY KID IN THE CITY.
The sickness struck everyone over the age of fourteen.
Mothers and fathers, older brothers, sisters and best friends. No one escaped its touch. And now children across London are being hunted by ferocious grown-ups . . .
THEY'RE HUNGRY. THEY'RE BLOODTHIRSTY AND THEY AREN'T GIVING UP
DogNut and the rest of his crew want to find their lost friends, on a deadly mission from the Tower of London to Buckingham Palace and beyond, as the sickos lie in wait.
But who are their friends and who are the enemy in this changed world?

In a Nutshell: Brilliant. Just read it. Now.

Dearly Departed,
We are gathered here today to discuss The Fear by Charlie Higson. Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. How do you do it? Every time I read one of the books in this wonderful zombie series, I'm simply floored by how he writes. Mostly, it's in the characters - these books have a huge cast of characters, but at no point do any of these characters feel like they're just filler. Every single one of them has their own story to tell in the zombie apocalypse, and Higson has such a knack for writing characters that feel so real. The exchanges between characters and the glimpses we see of their thoughts makes you really want them to survive, though in a book like this you know that not all of them will make it to the last page.

The first book in the series, The Enemy (technically, though, this is the third in chronological order) really blew me away due to its no-holds-barred approach to killing off characters. Nobody was safe, and I think that's what makes for damn good horror. You really come to care for the characters and don't want to see anything bad happen to them. But when the bad does happen, it's still pretty spectacular. Some of the gory scenes in this book are just top notch - rather than just excess blood and guts, they're original gross-out stuff, particularly DogNut's flashbacks to what he finds in the bank cellar.

Reading this has made me want to go back and reread the rest of the series so I can see how all the stories intertwine. Higson really is a masterful storyteller, one of the best, and you never find yourself wanting to get back to other groups' stories, which is a common gripe of mine in multi-POV stories.

Truly top-notch zombie horror, and I'm very pleased to see there will be another book in the series out next year.

Review - Dark Inside

The Eulogy (From the Publisher):
Since mankind began, civilizations have always fallen: the Romans, the Greeks, the Aztecs…Now it’s our turn. Huge earthquakes rock the world. Cities are destroyed. But something even more awful is happening. An ancient evil has been unleashed, turning everday people into hunters, killers, crazies.
 Mason's mother is dying after a terrible car accident. As he endures a last vigil at her hospital bed, his school is bombed and razed to the ground, and everyone he knows is killed. Aries survives an earthquake aftershock on a bus, and thinks the worst is over when a mysterious stranger pulls her out of the wreckage, but she’s about to discover a world changed forever. Clementine, the only survivor of an emergency town hall meeting that descends into murderous chaos, is on the run from savage strangers who used to be her friends and neighbors. And Michael witnesses a brutal road rage incident that is made much worse by the arrival of the police--who gun down the guilty party and then turn on the bystanding crowd.
 Where do you go for justice when even the lawmakers have turned bad? These four teens are on the same road in a world gone mad. Struggling to survive, clinging on to love and meaning wherever it can be found, this is a journey into the heart of darkness – but also a journey to find each other and a place of safety.

The Epitaph (In a Nutshell): A compelling survival horror that puts an interesting spin on the zombie genre.

Dearly Departed,
We are gathered here today to discuss Dark Inside by Jeyn Roberts. I love a good survival horror, and this certainly had me on the edge of my seat as I waited to see what would eventually happen to each of the characters. I liked the stories told through the eyes of the four different characters, and I especially enjoyed their moments of realisation that something was going seriously wrong in this world.

The 'zombies' in this book aren't the dead who have risen to walk the earth, but instead are regular people who have been infected with a kind of rage. I would've liked a little more explanation of how this came about, because even when you reach the end you're left asking more than a few questions, but this withholding of knowledge does serve to create a nice atmosphere of fear and helplessness.

What I particularly liked about this version of the apocalypse was the attention to detail, which is something that often gets overlooked in stories like these. The characters' need to change clothes because they smell (or got peed on), the crappy food they're forced to eat, and one character's death due to a pre-existing medical condition were all well thought out details that helped make this end of the world feel like a realistic one.

Review: Crawlers

The Eulogy (From the Publishers): Ben is on a school trip. So is Jasmine. What they don't know is that not everybody in the theatre is there to watch the play and, in fact, they'll never get to see it . . .
There is panic at the Barbican when the fire alarms start wailing, but the strangely silent theatre staff, trap them inside the building rather than letting them out to safety. Ben, Jasmine and their classmates soon discover that there's no fire - what's happening is much weirder, and much scarier.
Strange spider-like creatures swarm through the building attacking people and turning them into vicious killers, and the kids have to run for their lives. But barricaded in an office, with these creatures waiting outsde for them, the children realise they're stuck. Will they ever get out? And, more importantly can they trust each other . . . ?

The Epitaph (In a Nutshell): An excellent survival horror with some disgustingly creepy monsters and a great group of characters!

Dearly Departed
We are gathered here today to discuss Crawlers, by Sam Enthoven. Straight away the cover grabs you by the eyeballs and doesn’t let go. I mean really, it’s disgusting – but in a good way! I’ve heard tell that it’s a squashed dead squid the publisher picked up from a fish market and slapped on somebody’s neck. I wonder who volunteered to be the neck?
And once you get past the cover, it’s just as thrilling an experience. Straight away we’re introduced to ‘The Queen’ who we come to understand is some kind of grotesque monster who wants to cause mayhem and destruction. Bad news for the main characters, who are finding it hard enough dealing with the Queen’s crawler subjects without worrying if one among them is a traitor. I loved the tense scenes in this book, and it felt incredibly claustrophobic at times which amped up the horror really well. Lots of scares and edge of your seat moments, not to mention busily flicking through pages wondering just who will get out alive!

4 Skulls - Dead Good