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A review by severina2001
Contain by Saul W. Tanpepper
2.0
When a zombie-like disease sweeps the world, some remnants of society take refuge in an underground bunker.
This reads like a hodge-podge of ideas. Take the tech and the bunker from Hugh Howey's Silo series, throw in a bit of the vampire-like creature of Justin Cronin's The Passage and mix him with your basic shady-government bio-engineered super-soldier and then sprinkle with some teenage angst, and you've basically got this story. Tanpepper tries very hard to keep the tension going, but his descriptions of the "Wraiths" are so vague that I felt I never really knew what I was supposed to be scared of. We're told that they are people who become almost instantly infected. They turn grey. Their eyes turn black. Their 'soul' is drained. They die but are still animate. A single touch will turn you into one of them (no biting here.) But then they are described as drifting from the trees, as though they were camouflaged in them, like smoke or shadow. They seem to float, not walk or stumble. They didn't strike me with fear because I couldn't even picture what they were.
And in the bunker, everyone is just so damned serious all the time. The structure is disjointed, almost as though there are passages missing between chapters. The big revelations come out of left field, decisions are made based on nonsensical leaps of illogic, and the result is more over-the-top and campy than shocking. Lastly, I knew this was the first of a series, but I still expected a better wrap-up of this story with some enticements of what was to come to encourage me to continue. Nope, there's still a lot of plot threads left dangling, so don't pick up this one unless you intend to continue with the rest of the series.
This reads like a hodge-podge of ideas. Take the tech and the bunker from Hugh Howey's Silo series, throw in a bit of the vampire-like creature of Justin Cronin's The Passage and mix him with your basic shady-government bio-engineered super-soldier and then sprinkle with some teenage angst, and you've basically got this story. Tanpepper tries very hard to keep the tension going, but his descriptions of the "Wraiths" are so vague that I felt I never really knew what I was supposed to be scared of. We're told that they are people who become almost instantly infected. They turn grey. Their eyes turn black. Their 'soul' is drained. They die but are still animate. A single touch will turn you into one of them (no biting here.) But then they are described as drifting from the trees, as though they were camouflaged in them, like smoke or shadow. They seem to float, not walk or stumble. They didn't strike me with fear because I couldn't even picture what they were.
And in the bunker, everyone is just so damned serious all the time. The structure is disjointed, almost as though there are passages missing between chapters. The big revelations come out of left field, decisions are made based on nonsensical leaps of illogic, and the result is more over-the-top and campy than shocking. Lastly, I knew this was the first of a series, but I still expected a better wrap-up of this story with some enticements of what was to come to encourage me to continue. Nope, there's still a lot of plot threads left dangling, so don't pick up this one unless you intend to continue with the rest of the series.