Tuesday 28 July 2009

FANTASY REVIEW: Tomes of the Dead: Way of the Barefoot Zombie - Jasper Bark


BOOK BLURB:

On a private island in the Caribbean, business guru Doc Papa has reinvented the zombie as a role model for the super rich. The world's business elite come to St. Ignatius to study the Way of the Barefoot Zombie and interact with a captive colony of the undead. However, the Zombie Liberation Front and a rogue priestess ensure that the business guru and his acolytes are soon on the menu.


REVIEW:

Way back in the early days of video, the Zombie movie was pretty much set on an exotic Island (Haiti or some other Voodoo hotspot) and a group of people are plunged into a survival nightmare against the undead hordes usually by Dario Argento.) So having grown up with these films, I ended up feeling all nostalgic and decided to enjoy this offering from Abaddon’s Tomes of the Dead series.

As you’d expect from this type of book there’s plenty of blood and guts and a pretty swift pace to keep the reader glued to the story however the major problem was the use of info dumps that really weren’t that necessary and just detracted from what was otherwise a good solid Zombie book. Whilst the villains were a little two dimensional, the struggle for survival really does hark back to the classics of the zombie genre and will enthuse a new generation to give these gem’s a try. However, I do hope that Bark’s next novel fixes the problems with this offering, perhaps with a brief world setting page prior to the tale so that the reader won’t have interruptions that just detract from an otherwise reasonable plot.

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