REVIEW: Zombie Apocalypse - Stephen Jones

• Year first released:  2010
• ISBN of the edition I read:  9780762440016
• Publisher of the edition I read:  Running Press Book Publishers
• My rating (out of 5):  2.5

To be clear, I definitely picked up Zombie Apocalypse as a guilty pleasure. No expectations to speak of - just some zombie fun. The first hundred or so pages had me a bit fooled, though, into thinking this could actually be better than I had suspected.

Turns out I got a little ahead of myself by thinking this, of course - but who's surprised?

Apocalypse is, technically, a book of short stories, all by different authors. However, the creator, Stephen Jones, did a surprisingly good job of making the stories connect. They all - or most of them, at least - work together to tell different angles of, essentially, the same story: a government project in London ignores the proper protocol and digs up a centuries-old graveyard, unleashing an evolved version of the Black Plague...

etc. etc. etc.

Most of the stories aren't expressed as straightforward narratives - instead we have government memorandums, research notes, email and Tweet exchanges, diary notes, etc. - a great presentation for this sort of overarching plot.

The first several stories interlace like puzzle pieces, setting the book off on a great, disturbing note. Settings are repeated, characters reappear, the unfolding is elaborate and precise.

If the entire book had kept up this momentum, it actually could have been one of the better zombie books about there.* It doesn't take long for Apocalypse to lose its way, though. Starting somewhere around the first Tweet-exchange story ("Tweets of the Dead" by Jay Russell), the focus of the book gets more shifty and less defined. (In fact, specifically, "Tweets of the Dead" is one of the least interesting and least well-written of the collection.) From there, the stories get to be more hit-and-miss.

There are several missed opportunities here and there throughout - many of the stories seem to allude to larger things to come...which don't (at least not in any sort of meaningful, worthwhile way).

I briefly mentioned the overall story - London, graveyard, plague, blah blah blah - but, unfortunately, this actually only describes the first three quarters of the book. Up to that point, it's entirely centered around the events of London. And then, inexplicably, we have a story in Australia ("Wasting Matilda"). Why? - because...well, it's hard to say. Perhaps Robert Hood didn't get the memo that the stories were supposed to connect? Not really sure.

In fact, from this point on, the stories erratically and disjointedly jump around the world, only finally returning to England for the final, anticlimactic, terrible final story/speech.

The first half of the book is actually generally fun and worthwhile - if you're comfortable setting it aside before things derail. Majorly derail. The graphic design of the book alone makes it worth spending at least a bit of time with, and at least the first few stories are genuinely interesting for the genre. I only wish Jones hadn't let the latter half of the book slip through the cracks so badly.



*Actually, I guess, this is still one of the best zombie books out there - but that says more about other zombie books on the market than it says about this one.

Guilty Pleasures, pt. 1.5 / REVIEW: DEATHNOTE: Another Note - The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases - NISIOISIN

• Year first released:  2006 (Japanese), 2008 (English)
• ISBN of the edition I read:  9781421518831
• Publisher of the edition I read: VIZ Media LLC
• My rating (out of 5): 4.5-ish. or maybe 2ish. hmm... 

Now I want to explain to you one of the reasons I’ve been thinking about guilty pleasures recently:

Just last week, I read the Japanese light novel DEATHNOTE: Another Note - The Los Angeles BB Murder Cases by NISIOISIN. As usual, after reading it, I sat down to write a review of it for you. I found that I was rather stuck, though.

First of all, I absolutely LOVED the book. But when I tried to discuss the book’s style, I had to admit that it’s, frankly, pretty badly written. (I believe that some of this was bad translation, but definitely not all of it.*) It had a constantly shifting POV that was more than a little distracting. To add to this, the first-person narrator played a rather confusing role in the story, one that I don’t think I can definitively explain for you. This is largely because I don’t think I fully understood who the narrator was supposed to be – in fact, to be even more blunt, it felt like the author made a mistake in who the narrator, as a character, is in the overall DEATHNOTE universe. Oops. 

Perhaps, then, I loved the book because it had such great content (even though the form was bad) …right?

Well, partly yes. The plot was great, and had a killer ending. (No pun intended – I mean, it’s a serial-killer mystery, after all.) But what I certainly loved most about the book was the character L (who you’ll know if you’ve read the DEATHNOTE manga or seen the corresponding anime). Revisiting his character – and in prose, instead of only manga or anime form – was an absolute delight. He’s every bit as fantastic and hilarious and genius here as he was in the manga/anime. Very possibly my favorite character to have come out of the genre as a whole.

So then. When I tried to give a numerical score to the book, I wanted to give it a 4.5.

I realized, though, that this score is actually rather misleading. This book doesn’t really deserve a 4.5, for many of the reasons I already described (amongst several others). 

Yet I totally loved the book. It was an absolute blast for me. And so calling it anything less than a 4.5 feels wrong, too.

It turns out that the book is great, but it's not actually good.

Weird, I know.

Another Note was not high-quality. But dang it if it wasn’t one of the funnest books I’ve read recently – and, therefore, worth every minute I spent with it.**

* * * 

*This is actually the second book I've read by NISIOISIN in the past couple weeks. Each had a different translator. Both translations were fine - nothing entirely remarkable or entirely egregious - but overall I think the other book, Decapitation, flowed a little better as far as the translation is concerned.

**By the way, if you’re thinking of reading this book, it’s highly advisable that you read the original DEATHNOTE manga or watch the anime first. This is because:

1. Even though this book is a prequel to the manga/anime series, it actually contains spoilers for the series. 
2. The series is a better “jumping-off-point” to getting a grasp on L’s character. This book itself doesn’t do much of anything to help you understand his personality; it’s better to come to the book with a good feel for it already. (And, again, since L is my favorite part of the book, approaching the manga/anime first will almost certainly increase your enjoyment of this book.)

All that said, if you are familiar with the tropes of DEATHNOTE and are considering this book: Yes. Absolutely. Read this - just know that it's not as "high-quality" as many other great books you could be reading. (In fact, I might even say it's not as "high-quality" as the manga itself, even though it's still totally worth it - especially if, like me, you realize how amazing L is.)

Guilty Pleasures, pt. 1

(Don't worry; this will only be a one-and-a-half part series, not five like The Art of Translation. 😏)

It had to come up sometime.

What’s up with so-called “guilty pleasures”? Is that even a real thing? Is it okay to read them? Is it okay to admit that you read them?

You may have noticed from this blog that I’m rather into literature of a “higher quality,” so to speak: classics, award-winners, literary fiction (instead of genre fiction*), foreign literature, etc. This is what I spend most of my time reading. I’m careful to analyze a book’s form (more than its content), will praise all sorts of aspects of writing (not just “Yeah, the book was fun/cool/clever, I guess.”), often sprinkle my thoughts with references to other books and writers, etc.

Despite this, though, the answer to all of the above is: yes, they exist; yes, it’s okay to read them; and yes, it’s okay to admit that you read them. Of course it is! Gotta do what you love, right?

As I’ve stated once or twice before, if I’m not reading to learn, I’m reading to be entertained or inspired. And dang it if “guilty pleasures” aren’t entertaining. Sometimes all I’m in the mood for is a fun book that’ll make me smile or laugh without requiring any sort of depth as I approach it. In fact, odd though it may sound, sometimes it's great to read for fun as a break from reading for analysis. 

Crazy, I know.

So what qualifies as a “guilty pleasure,” anyway?

I suppose the easy answer to this is: a book (or movie, video game, song, etc. though I’m not really thinking about those right now) which isn’t really “high-quality,” so to speak, but is highly enjoyable anyway. Or we could say it's a book that we like more than it, per se, deserves to be liked.

Of course there can be exceptions to that description (and some people might take offense to it, though I promise none is intended), but it’s close enough for us to work with for now.

For sure guilty pleasures can go too far sometimes. Fifty Shades of Grey should never be read by anyone ever, even if you're only approaching it as a "guilty pleasure." No no no. Please read anything else in the history of ever. Ever. I mean: ever. Like, EVER. No really.

But on the whole, taking a break from the depth and the analysis and the captivatingly intellectual can be refreshing, right?

I'll give you an overarching example (then a couple specific examples).

Though I haven't yet discussed it in this realm, I love horror. (I'll be sure to share LOTS of thoughts on the matter in the future. Hehe...) That said, there are very very precious few horror books that I (or most people, I would argue) would actually consider to be "high quality." The overwhelmingly vast majority of horror novels are really nothing more than...well, guilty pleasures. There are plenty of exceptions, of course, especially amongst the classics: Dracula, Frankenstein, the works of Edgar Allan Poe. But these days, most horror is more enjoyable than it is intellectually gratifying.

(By the way, I could actually say the same thing about Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Mystery; I merely decided to focus on Horror for a moment there.)

And that's okay.

I'm also a sucker for novelizations of video-games - or, at least, books that are based on/take place in video game universes. A couple favorites are Bioshock by John Shirley and Darksiders: The Abomination Vault by Ari Marmell. Are they going to win awards? Were they written exceptionally well? Absolutely not. But they sure as heck were fun. And even though I know a lot of these aren't going to be good, I still can't help but pick them up when I go to Barnes & Noble.


What about you, friends? What are some guilty pleasures that you read/enjoy? (But please don't tell me if it's Fifty Shades of Grey.)

* * *

* This may surprise you, my claim that I read more general literary fiction as opposed to genre fiction (mystery, sci-fi, etc.). If you look at the number of my reviews for genre fiction, they add up to more than the general fiction, at least as of the time I'm writing this. That said, though, I'll ask you to keep a couple things in mind:

1. I'm trying to give you a good variety of reviews. I'd hate to only give you one type of review, or reviews for only one type of book.
2. I'm not posting the reviews for every single book I read, nor even in the order I read them. In fact, I've only reviewed for you a little over half of the books I've actually read since I first began this blog several weeks ago. (I'm sort of working on some of the others, but these things take time, you know.)