xterminal's review
3.0
Rebecca Brock, Abominations (RLB, 2007)
If you've read a decent amount of self- and vanity-published horror, you are no doubt as familiar with one maxim as I am: this stuff is either really, really good or really, really bad. There was a brief period in the middle of the last decade when you could tell which was which by the fact that most of the really, really good stuff was getting picked up by the majors, but (a) there's just too much of it out there now for Random House and Bantam/Doubleday/Dell to have sifted through it all, and (b) the bigs have started signing, shall we say, some more... mediocre authors. (Read: guys who they would've laughed at before David Moody sold a couple hundred thousand copies of the Autumn quartet on word of mouth alone.) So we're back to square one, where every time you pick up a book by a press you've never heard of, a vanity publisher, or someone who did the publishing work themselves, you could be getting a handful of steaming turd.
Or you could be getting Abominations.
There's nothing new here, but expecting something new in a zombie book these days (while Brock does wander into vampire and mermaid territory on occasion, the book's subtitle, A Collection of (Mostly) Zombie Stories, is accurate) is about as good an idea as expecting the jobless rate to go down in America's major metropolitan areas. Abominations is chock-full of good old-fashioned zombie stories, and the strength is in the telling. Brock has a lot of fun with the genre, and she pulls in a bunch of different takes on the horror/thriller to play with.
I'm not sure I can give you a favorite from this collection. There are a number of strong possibilities. “Trailer Park of the Damned” is loads of fun, a kind of feminist take on King's “The Mist”, but with zombies instead of Lovecraftian beasties, and killer rednecks added to boot. (The ebook version contains a snippet from an upcoming novel featuring “Trailer Park of the Damned”'s heroine, Jolene. I'll be picking that one up when it comes out for sure.) “Fanboys” hammers George Romero's well-trod consumerist-zombie angle home unsubtly, but with an inventive enough twist that I didn't mind that one bit. There's another inventive variation on the main conflict in that one in “The Beautiful People”, in which Paris Hilton, under a pseudonym, has to face a zombie outbreak, where the only person who actually cares whether she lives or dies is a freakish hero-worshipper who she has a restraining order out against. “Ground Floor”: zombies, elevator, claustrophobic main character, what could be better? (Actually, if the claustrophobia had played into the story a little more.) “Dominion”: what happens when demonic possession goes horribly, horribly wrong. You might expect this story to be funny, but it ain't.
Okay, after all that, I think I do have a favorite, “When We Are As We Once Were.” It's the quietest story in the collection, and the most emotional. Given the usual zombie outbreak, you have a small group of survivors in a nursing home, pretty much awaiting the inevitable, but with the extra ticking time bomb that with no access to the outside and dwindling supplies of medication and food, the residents are going to start dying soon. This is good stuff, and it's worth the price of admission on its own (especially given that the Kindle version is priced to move).
Not perfect, but if you're a zombie-lit fan, don't overlook this one. A lot of good stuff to be found between these covers. *** ½
If you've read a decent amount of self- and vanity-published horror, you are no doubt as familiar with one maxim as I am: this stuff is either really, really good or really, really bad. There was a brief period in the middle of the last decade when you could tell which was which by the fact that most of the really, really good stuff was getting picked up by the majors, but (a) there's just too much of it out there now for Random House and Bantam/Doubleday/Dell to have sifted through it all, and (b) the bigs have started signing, shall we say, some more... mediocre authors. (Read: guys who they would've laughed at before David Moody sold a couple hundred thousand copies of the Autumn quartet on word of mouth alone.) So we're back to square one, where every time you pick up a book by a press you've never heard of, a vanity publisher, or someone who did the publishing work themselves, you could be getting a handful of steaming turd.
Or you could be getting Abominations.
There's nothing new here, but expecting something new in a zombie book these days (while Brock does wander into vampire and mermaid territory on occasion, the book's subtitle, A Collection of (Mostly) Zombie Stories, is accurate) is about as good an idea as expecting the jobless rate to go down in America's major metropolitan areas. Abominations is chock-full of good old-fashioned zombie stories, and the strength is in the telling. Brock has a lot of fun with the genre, and she pulls in a bunch of different takes on the horror/thriller to play with.
I'm not sure I can give you a favorite from this collection. There are a number of strong possibilities. “Trailer Park of the Damned” is loads of fun, a kind of feminist take on King's “The Mist”, but with zombies instead of Lovecraftian beasties, and killer rednecks added to boot. (The ebook version contains a snippet from an upcoming novel featuring “Trailer Park of the Damned”'s heroine, Jolene. I'll be picking that one up when it comes out for sure.) “Fanboys” hammers George Romero's well-trod consumerist-zombie angle home unsubtly, but with an inventive enough twist that I didn't mind that one bit. There's another inventive variation on the main conflict in that one in “The Beautiful People”, in which Paris Hilton, under a pseudonym, has to face a zombie outbreak, where the only person who actually cares whether she lives or dies is a freakish hero-worshipper who she has a restraining order out against. “Ground Floor”: zombies, elevator, claustrophobic main character, what could be better? (Actually, if the claustrophobia had played into the story a little more.) “Dominion”: what happens when demonic possession goes horribly, horribly wrong. You might expect this story to be funny, but it ain't.
Okay, after all that, I think I do have a favorite, “When We Are As We Once Were.” It's the quietest story in the collection, and the most emotional. Given the usual zombie outbreak, you have a small group of survivors in a nursing home, pretty much awaiting the inevitable, but with the extra ticking time bomb that with no access to the outside and dwindling supplies of medication and food, the residents are going to start dying soon. This is good stuff, and it's worth the price of admission on its own (especially given that the Kindle version is priced to move).
Not perfect, but if you're a zombie-lit fan, don't overlook this one. A lot of good stuff to be found between these covers. *** ½
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