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A review by xterminal
Necropolis Rising by Dave Jeffery
3.0
Dave Jeffery, Necropolis, vol. 1: Necropolis Rising (Dark Continents, 2011)
One of my favorite books of last year was Forrest Armstrong's The Deadheart Shelters, so I've started keeping my ear to the same ground that coughed that one up for me to see what it's rumbling about these days. The two books it most recently divulged were Matt Hults' Husk (elsewhere this ish) and Dave Jeffery's Necropolis Rising. The latter is not a bad little book, and I will admit that my rating of it is personal; I knocked it down from “slightly above average” to “dead average” because of a few personal grammatical-nitpicky quirks, which I'll get to eventually.
There's a solid premise here, and half of it you maybe haven't seen before. A genetically-engineered virus has gotten out of its lab and infected much of the city if Birmingham (UK, not US). The military think they've managed to contain it (and a competent military alone would be enough to set this story apart from most zombie tales), but there are a couple of skunks in the works. One of them is a small band of cyber-criminals being very well paid to get into Birmingham's crime lab and plant a virus. They're on a timetable, and if they don't deliver, they die. The other is a mole inside the military itself, planted there by the company engineering the virus to make sure that the one individual seemingly immune to the plague is evacuated and delivered to them.
Not bad, not bad at all. Jeffery combines the bits you do know all too well (ZOMGIMMUNESAVIOR!!!) with the Dave Jeffery Original Programming bits into a fast-paced survival-horror scenario that works most of the time. The problem is that the manuscript could have used a good editor to suggest to Jeffery when word substitutions would have been a good idea (“O'Connell was reviled by such a thought.”) or when he was using an incorrect form of a cliché (“worse case scenario” pops up once). And then there's the biggie. If I had a list of the ten golden rules for spelling and grammar, this would be on it, and if it doesn't bother you as much as it does me, than take this with a grain of salt. But please, Mr. Jeffery, and the hundreds of other writers who have done this: learn the difference between “phase” (a stage or aspect of something) and “faze” (to shock). In Mr. Jeffery's case: there is no such word as “unphased”. And yes, being the little grammar-Nazi bitch that I am, that was enough for me to dock this half a star. It's still getting a recommend, just not as strong as it would have gotten otherwise. ** ½
One of my favorite books of last year was Forrest Armstrong's The Deadheart Shelters, so I've started keeping my ear to the same ground that coughed that one up for me to see what it's rumbling about these days. The two books it most recently divulged were Matt Hults' Husk (elsewhere this ish) and Dave Jeffery's Necropolis Rising. The latter is not a bad little book, and I will admit that my rating of it is personal; I knocked it down from “slightly above average” to “dead average” because of a few personal grammatical-nitpicky quirks, which I'll get to eventually.
There's a solid premise here, and half of it you maybe haven't seen before. A genetically-engineered virus has gotten out of its lab and infected much of the city if Birmingham (UK, not US). The military think they've managed to contain it (and a competent military alone would be enough to set this story apart from most zombie tales), but there are a couple of skunks in the works. One of them is a small band of cyber-criminals being very well paid to get into Birmingham's crime lab and plant a virus. They're on a timetable, and if they don't deliver, they die. The other is a mole inside the military itself, planted there by the company engineering the virus to make sure that the one individual seemingly immune to the plague is evacuated and delivered to them.
Not bad, not bad at all. Jeffery combines the bits you do know all too well (ZOMGIMMUNESAVIOR!!!) with the Dave Jeffery Original Programming bits into a fast-paced survival-horror scenario that works most of the time. The problem is that the manuscript could have used a good editor to suggest to Jeffery when word substitutions would have been a good idea (“O'Connell was reviled by such a thought.”) or when he was using an incorrect form of a cliché (“worse case scenario” pops up once). And then there's the biggie. If I had a list of the ten golden rules for spelling and grammar, this would be on it, and if it doesn't bother you as much as it does me, than take this with a grain of salt. But please, Mr. Jeffery, and the hundreds of other writers who have done this: learn the difference between “phase” (a stage or aspect of something) and “faze” (to shock). In Mr. Jeffery's case: there is no such word as “unphased”. And yes, being the little grammar-Nazi bitch that I am, that was enough for me to dock this half a star. It's still getting a recommend, just not as strong as it would have gotten otherwise. ** ½