 By Jeremy Azevedo |
I love zombies just as much as the next dork, but there comes a time in which “zombie fatigue” begins to set in. It seems that everyone is trying to get a rotten slice of the zombie pie these days. |
We've got zombie movies coming out every 3 months, zombie “survival guides” releasing just as frequently, and zombie video games coming out of our ears. Even Marvel Comics has been getting in on the action with their “Marvel Zombies” graphic novels. So it was with some trepidation that I began flipping through “Zombies: a Record of the Year of Infection”. And, as it usually is with most zombie-related products, I soon found my imagination captivated and I was hooked. Turns out that there is no such thing as “zombie fatigue” after all. That’s science!
Zombies: a serious global pandemic.
“Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection” is unlike most books about zombies that you will find in that it is neither a novel nor a survival guide, not a graphic novel, not a book of bad tattoos, not a screenplay, but something different altogether. It’s a journal, handwritten and illustrated, detailing a year in the life of a survivor of them impending zombie apocalypse (that, as we all know, is more or less certain to break out any day know). If you’ve read Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, “The Road”, imagine that, but only minus the kid and plus a shitload of zombies. Now you’ve got the basic gist of it.
The presentation of this book is really its strong point. The illustrations are particularly graphic, and the main character is actually pretty likeable. Which is important, because he’s really the only character for at least half the book. He’s like a junior scientist with some artistic training, which gives him some motivation to study and write about zombies instead of just being all “Aahh! Zombies are after me!” all the time with little rudimentary stick figure drawings or whatever. Which is probably what my journal would look like under the same circumstances, if I were to be completely honest with you.
This is about 1/10th as gorey as some of the stuff that comes later, don't worry.
The only real downside to this book is its brevity: I read the entire thing in a night or two. But then again, it’s good that it doesn’t go overlong or become pointlessly descriptive, because that would sort of break down the illusion that you were reading someone’s private journal. “Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection” would make a great coffee table book (if your friends are into that sort of thing. Mine certainly are) or maybe a gift for a friend that’s really into “Left 4 Dead” and George Romero movies.
I award “Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection” 8 out of 10 Zombie Strippers
+1 if you’re a super huge fan of anything zombie related
-2 if you’d rather eat your own face than look at another goddamn zombie anything.
