Monster Trilogy, by David Wellington

[Omphalos]

By now even those of you who only vaguely pay attention to me should know at least that I like zombie stories, although to be perfectly honest I think its best stated by mentioning that I have a debilitating weakness for zombie lore. I just cannot pass the stuff up in the store, so I have a big shelf of DVD's and movies way up high, so my young'uns do not find them and get completely freaked out. Now, I may be a complete sucker for any zombie story, and I may own everything that is available out there, but I do have a critical eye towards the stuff. In other words, I will happily tell you what is junk and what is not. In the subgenre of zombie tales, there is a lot of junk out there. For a long time there were a lot of movies and books published that did nothing but deliver a copy of what came before, only grosser. But since the 1990's there has been a huge upswing in interest in these kinds of stories, and some bigger brains with fresher ideas have taken a crack at adding something to our collective zombie myth. Movies like 28 Days Later and books like World War Z have remade the zombie tale from an exercise in disgust to a metaphor for the common man and the pathetic nature of our actual everyday existence. I have no real idea why this was done, though I suspect that like much of the madness that has plagued our society since the early 1990's it had something to do with the approach of the year 2000 and our ingrained fear of that number as a final one. Actually, I think that is generally why we have seen such an upswing in interest in apocalypse stories of all types recently. But zombie apocalypse stories have one integral attribute that other apocalypse stories do not. In, for instance, a nuclear war story there may be a post apocalypse side of the tale where the author tells you what happens to survivors, but zombie stories do one better than that. In addition to giving a good survivor story, a good zombie tale tells you something about life after death too. Granted, it’s usually a story straight out of the ninth circle of Hell, but like it or not, that element is always there, even if it is just a tickle in the back of your mind...Please click here, or on the book cover above, to be taken to the complete review..