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A review by wolfthulhu
End by Jason Kristopher
3.0
I enjoyed the overall story here. New take on the cause and history of zombies and most of the tale was about the human interactions and relationships, using the zombies as a driving force behind the story but not so much on screen action. Which is a good thing to me, as a huge fan of Romero's work.
The author uses an interesting mix of first person (with the main character) and third (when the action focuses on anyone else). The story keeps a good pace, only lagging as things begin to wrap up towards the end. There is a good core group of main characters, fairly well developed and easy to care about.
On the negative side, the military organization is horrible. The scale of fraternization amongst the members would never be tolerated in the actual US Armed Forces, yet in this book it is actually *encouraged*!!? The support characters feel incredibly flat and stereotyped. The 'homophobic' Ames is offensive, not so much because of his prejudice, but because he is such a cliched redneck. To the point of being ready to kill a man because he is gay... then he has a COMPLETE reversal and 5 minutes after having this man in his sights (literally) he is saying 'Oh, sorry I was such a jerk before. You're totally cool and I was wrong all the years that I hated you'.
Editorially, there are some glaring issues with the kindle version that, as far as I can tell, don't exist in my hardcopy of the book. These are repeated words or lines where punctuation was changed or persons/units being talked about were swapped out, however the new text ended up being inserted with the old instead of replacing it. This is a fairly minor annoyance in most places where it is an isolated occurrence, but there are places where entire passages are riddled with these repeated words and it gets to be a bit distracting.
I'd love to give this book 4 stars, as I really did enjoy the read. Minor issues add up though, and three it gets (possibly a weak 3.5).
The author uses an interesting mix of first person (with the main character) and third (when the action focuses on anyone else). The story keeps a good pace, only lagging as things begin to wrap up towards the end. There is a good core group of main characters, fairly well developed and easy to care about.
On the negative side, the military organization is horrible. The scale of fraternization amongst the members would never be tolerated in the actual US Armed Forces, yet in this book it is actually *encouraged*!!? The support characters feel incredibly flat and stereotyped. The 'homophobic' Ames is offensive, not so much because of his prejudice, but because he is such a cliched redneck. To the point of being ready to kill a man because he is gay... then he has a COMPLETE reversal and 5 minutes after having this man in his sights (literally) he is saying 'Oh, sorry I was such a jerk before. You're totally cool and I was wrong all the years that I hated you'.
Editorially, there are some glaring issues with the kindle version that, as far as I can tell, don't exist in my hardcopy of the book. These are repeated words or lines where punctuation was changed or persons/units being talked about were swapped out, however the new text ended up being inserted with the old instead of replacing it. This is a fairly minor annoyance in most places where it is an isolated occurrence, but there are places where entire passages are riddled with these repeated words and it gets to be a bit distracting.
I'd love to give this book 4 stars, as I really did enjoy the read. Minor issues add up though, and three it gets (possibly a weak 3.5).