Articles tagged with: Zombies

Crossed could be described as a disturbed version of The Walking Dead.

Imagine some kind of zombies that become cannibals when infected but retain a certain intelligence (but are completely mad).

Imagine scenes of raping (male and female), children dying in really gross ways, hard-language and terribly cruel situations.

Then you can start to picture how is Crossed.

It is good, but really not for everyone, I thought Walking Dead was hard but compared with this comic it is nothing. But if you're willing to, it is not badly narrated and contains some disturbing but imaginative "survival ideas".

The flashbacks are not perfectly placed and sometimes you need to read one or to pages to notice it switched back to the past again. The ending part was neither bad nor incredible but overall a recommended reading.

Posted on 2011-02-06

The Living Dead is a compilation of horror stories with a zombie setting. There are stories from some famous writers: Stephen King, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, George R. R. Martin...

The book contains a lot of short stories. And it is a good thing, because you wil enjoy some and dislike others. Not because they are bad, but becuase a few authors either go to the limit of the theme (almost no zombies at all) or gets too visceral or morbid (two stories made me think that their writers are sick).

Some of them are really good and scary, though. Imagine World War Z without restrictions: A school teacher gone mad "teaching" zombie children, how mad could someone become trying to pass by as one more zombie, how would be to have zombie servants...

The quality of the writers also varies from story to story. I'm no expert (english is not my mother tongue), but a few were bad written or maybe using too much slang.

The book is definetly not bad but I recommend skipping those stories you don't enjoy, because some of them are really disgusting.

Posted on 2010-09-19

Another finished book about zombies, The Zombie Survival Guide (from Max Brooks). It was written before World War Z so I have been able to compare things on both books in inverse order (I've readed first WWZ).

This book tries to be a "serious" guide to defend yourself from zombies. As simple as it sounds :D

It is sometimes funny, and has a bit of black humour on it, but mostly tries to be as serious and applied as possible.

It gives all sort of advices, from how to defend your home to how to establish a contingency plan, how to "attack" and raid zombie-infested zones, tactics, and some historical zombie attacks (backgrounds for the supposed guide ;)

So basically we can say the book is 85% a manual of "how to live fighting zombies on a daily basis" and 15% a collection of zombie short-stories themed in the past.

The guide is really well documented, so much that a movie director wanting to do a zombie movie could use this guide as a manual of "how to make a zombie movie". Some tactis explained are funny but clever ones.

Some of the stories are really well thought and even scarier than the future depicted in World War Z (the one of the slaves ship is my favourite), and look like the seed that Brooks planted for WWZ (or maybe was a "playground" to see how well could he tell small zombie tales?).

If you enjoyed World War Z, or just like zombie movies, go grab this book before the apocalypse comes!

Posted on 2009-07-13

I've just finished reading The Walking Dead books 2, 3 and 4.

The comic is still ongoing and a few more numbers will still appear, so time to stop for a while :)

Without entering into spoilers, I will only say that the comic is quite good. As I commented with the first book, it focuses a lot on the psychological aspect and human behavior in a supposed apocalyptic global zombie outbreak, and this volumes make it even more important.

How would people survive on a long term? Will they become crazy? could they adapt and survive? and how? How the main character can protect his family at all costs?

This are just but a few points the book tries to tell. There are some typical movie scenarios too, but either as another situations or more in depth.

The plot has twists, some predictable, others a complete surprise, and in the fourth book there is a sudden but welcome pump of action and changes that has left me hungry for more.

I've noticed some coincidences with the book World War Z, but again, being a long-term series, The Walking Dead goes deeper and gives much more detail.

Highly recommended, specially now that it is back into Amazon stores (book 2 was almost impossible to obtain until recently).

Posted on 2009-06-23

Few weeks ago I finished reading World War Z, by Max Brooks.

Being a zombie films addict, I must say I was predisposed to enjoy the book, but it has been a real surprise...

The book is a compedium of small stories, told 10 years after World War III, aka World War Z because it was not fought between humans, but between humanity and a world-scale zombie plague. With this curious but not nobel-winning plot you could expect anything, and the results are amazingly good.

Brooks has taken a "realistic" approach, explaining as much as possible (taking into account we're talking about zombies ;) of the science of the plague, how it spreads around the world, how different countries, governments and cultures react to it, how each of the survivors is able to tell his/her history, etcetera.

I really like the approach. You never get tired of a history you don't like because they are at most 10 pages long. In fact, sometimes you end with the desire of knowing more of particular histories or survivors, more about what happened.

We have all sort of histories, from frozen zombies in the northen part of the globe, to military mistakes that end with heavy decimation of the US forces, doctors, rich and powerful people...

The author touches a lot of cliches, from typical zombie movies ones, adaptations of "I Am Legend" (even the military call some survivors LMoE, Last Man on Earth, for their surviving skills), interesting (and some very clever) tactics to detect and avoid zombies (using trained dogs, placing tape on the perimeters of the bases so that if a tape is broken a zombie is inside,...).

I enjoyed a lot the scientific approach to how to survive a global zombie plague, how would each government reach, what would happen if you were in the coast, in a city, in a small village, in the jungle, in a boat... Even how you could try to make money from the situation.

Really a lot of situations and themes have been cleverly though and depicted in the short stories.

The book hooks you until you finish it. It felt a bit short for my personal taste, and the finale was a bit too typical (very... "patriotic").

Definetly a recommendation for reading as soon as possible ;)

Posted on 2009-05-17