This is a book about a zombie apocalypse, centered in Austin, TX. I’m about halfway through the series but I have to write this review to try and warn away anyone who has listened to the Arisen series by Michael Stephen Fuchs and narrated by R.C. Bray. THAT is a zombie series worth listening to, a couple of times, at least. Slow Burn…not so much. If this is your first zombie book and you’ve never seen 28 Days Later, perhaps you’ll find this interesting. Or better yet, save yourself a credit and go get Fortress Britain.
For the life of me, I can’t understand writers who choose to write about a world wide human pandemic that turns people into ravenous, brain-fried cannibals, and make all the characters completely ignorant of “zombies”. No one in the book ever uses the word zombie. No one in the book can imagine the rapid spread of an infection as crazed people start biting and eating one another. It’s as if this is an alternate reality where Dawn of the Dead, World War Z or the Walking Dead were never conceived. Come on. Zombies are zombies. Everyone knows that. Hours of listening to people talk about “the infected” and “the whites”, gets real old real fast.
Add to that, the main character is an idiot. He’s absurdly gullible. Again, no clue about an end of the world scenario, he just teams up with any random person that happens along, some of whom are so annoying any normal person would leave them to die of their own cowardice and stupidity in the first five minutes after meeting them. Anyone who ever heard of zombies wouldn’t waste more than 30 seconds with them before running in the opposite direction. On numerous occasions, his repeated gullibility almost gets him and others around him killed and their safe havens overrun. He trusts people he meets, immediately, never questioning whether or not they might be a threat, which of course, many of them are.
The narrator doesn’t help in this regard. He doesn’t have a wide range of voices. But worse than that, his manner of delivery just seems to make the continuous string of stupid coming from the cast of characters even more annoying. The dialog is largely simplistic and, at times, unrealistic. I just can’t imagine two or three people having some of the ridiculous conversations they have. Ya, people are people and can certainly be annoying. But 55 hours of listening to dumb conversations and arguments, gets real old, real fast. Kinda like writing real old, real fast over and over.
It would be interesting to listen to this book narrated by Bray. R.C. can make many an otherwise mediocre book interesting, and that might be the case with this one. The author does create an interesting take on a zombie apocalypse. But the annoying characters coupled with an annoying delivery makes this a hard listen.