Bite Me

Hola Readers!  Who is ready for a promised rambling?  Cool, let's get to it.  Today's book is one that was given to me by one of my favorite firehouse buddy's waaaaaaay back in October.  It has been on my TBR pile since then, but various circumstances have conspired to keep pushing the book back until this last month.   The book is The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R. Carey and ended up being both exactly what I thought it was going to be, yet at the same time entirely different...As always SPOILERS AHEAD!

Melanie is a just a school age girl living in a post apocalyptic world...except that her life is limited to a cell and a classroom.  Melanie it turns out is part of...a test subject group of children...(the ellipses are 'cause I don't know how else to describe them.) Anyways during the week Melanie and her classmates are taken from their individual cells and strapped into wheelchairs.  They are also masked and muzzled.  The kids are then wheeled into a classroom where various teachers teach various topics with various degrees of success.  Ms. Justineau is Melanie's favorite and is probably the most effective teacher of the bunch.  Ms. Justineau is also drawn to Melanie, feeling as if she is special in someway.  So pretty quickly we find out that the world has been ravaged by humans turned zombie and that the children are a weird mutant strain of said zombie that are being studied on the military base they are being held.  Turns out that a strain of fungal infection that has mutated from Iphigenia In Aulis (which is a real thing) has jumped species and turned humans into some form of zombie carrier for the fungal spore.  The kids that are part of this strange class are all high functioning infected group called hungriest.  Melanie is by far the smartest and most inquisitive of the group.  Dr. Caroline Cadwell is our resident mad scientist who is willing to do whatever it takes to find a cure for the infection and that includes cutting up the infected kids, using the excuse that they haven't been human since infection.  Eventually the base is over run by humans known as "junkers" that are so far uninfected humans that live off the grid.  The only people to escape are Melanie, Dr Cadwell (who had been just about to dissect Melanie), Ms. Justineau (who went to rescue Melanie), Sgt. Eddie Parks (the hard ass with a heart of gold guy in charge of this whole circus) and Kieran Gallagher ( a young and borderline idealistic soldier).  The group progresses through the landscape in the hopes of reaching the main human settelment on the British Isle called Beacon.  Along the way each member of the group has to cope with what Melanie is, a hungry that has the appearance and mannerisms of a child.  She is intelligent, able to make her own choices and yet still has the hunger for living flesh that her "hungry" counterpoints all have.   Each person deals with it in a different way.  Ms. Justineau essentially believes that she is all little girl who just has an unfortunate disease and needs to be protected.  Dr. Cadwell see's her as her ticket to scientific glory and nothing more then a case to be dissected and studied.  Sgt. Parks see's Melanie as a both an insurmountable danger and an assets and is constantly torn between both view points.  Mr. Gallagher usually just forgets that Melanie is anything more then a child.  As the motley group progresses they come across all manner of hungries.  Most of them are mindless flesh eaters, but a few seem to retain some semblance of their old humanity to varying degrees.  Eventually they end up in London and discover hungries with weird gray stalks growing from their bodies.  Turns out that eventually the fungus eats up the body and starts to grow itself to release new spores.  After much intro and extrospection (that's a word...right?) the group ends up attacked and reduced.  In the end, right before she dies, Dr. Caldwell discovers that some few humans hang on to enough humanity to reproduce and those kids who are born with the infection are much more intelligent and human like...hence Melanie.  The remenents of the group run into a strange grey wall that appears to be massive amounts of fungus stalks with seed pods that burst when set on fire.  More fighting, dying and expounding and Melanie comes to a realization.  She puts Ms. Justineau, the sole remaining human in a bio suit then proceeds to set the grey wall on fire, releasing the spores.  See, Melanie figures that the more human infected hungeries are the next generation in human evolution and started spreading the spores to hasten the process, keeping Ms. Justineau to teach the new hungry children.

World Building - The world is fairly complete, with nothing to original until we get to the gray stalk wall, which adds a bit of surreal otherworldlyness to the whole deal. It is pretty much a destroyed modern day London and surrounding areas in a slightly futuristic and destroyed vibe.  Pretty whole and complete zombie apocalypse with a fungal twist.

Story - The story was an interesting mix of run of the mill zombie with bits of originalness (I'm just making up words all over this post).  The mechanism of the zombie infection was pretty original, and I liked that it had real origins (more on that in a minute).  The real story though is Melanie and everybody's reaction to her.  I have read various thoughts on what the supposed "twist" was in the book, and I would say the ending, with Melanie essentially dooming the whole British Isle and possibly all of humanity, while still possibly saving them was perhaps the most unexpected part of the book...at least for me.

Character - One of the best and worst parts about this book is probably the characters.  On the one hand you have characters like Melanie, who is very accepting of what she is, practical and able to adapt.  She is able to understand what she is without letting it overwhelm her, which is more then I can say for many adults.  On the other hand most of the other characters come across and pretty stock.  We have our mad scientist ho is willing to go way to far in the name of science.  The sweet teacher with a past that just wants to love the poor abandon child, the super gruff with a hidden heart of gold soldier...etc...That being said, even with the...tropieness of most of the characters, I still found myself engrossed in their story and sympathizing with most of them...so...yeah.

Editing - For the most part the editing was fairly decent.  The story moved forward and mostly made sense.  The chapters skipped around with different view points, which for the most part was pretty cool as we didn't only see the story from one perspective.  Every once in a while the transition between chapters was a bit jarring, but mostly it was pretty readable.

The Fungus - Ok, so my logical brain both loved and hated the explanation for the zombie plague.  On one hand the idea that the infection stemmed from a real fungus that really does turn living

creatures (albeit ant's) into fairly legit zombies is pretty cool.  It gives a fairly realistic way for this usually unrealistic plague to happen.  The progression of the fungus also is pretty well thought out and did not trigger any of my "oh right, like that would ever happen" bells.  On the other hand, the piece I do take issue with is that these monster flesh eating creatures would on occasion be lucid enough to get pregnant, carry the kid, give birth, not eat the baby, and then the baby would survive long enough to become the next step in the evolutionary process...not so much...Yeah.

The Author - This is the book that actually inspired my previous post.  I was reading it and thinking it was written for YA by an author that writes for that genre (I don't know why that was my assumption, but their you go.).  Anyways, I was actually a bit on the fence 'cause while I don't feel our youth should be sheltered or talked down to...this book just did not really vibe as one I would hand to a 12 year old.  Then I did some research and discovered who the author was and who the real intended audience was and magically the book totally changed tone for me.  In this case it made the overall experience infinatly better.  It is a gritty book that does not pull any punches and it fit's the authors more comic book style very well.  I also learned that the author wrote the screeenplay for the movie simultaneously, and that he stated that it was purposely different from the book.   I have not seen it yet, but if it is worth it, I'll post about it later.

Expectations - This book was a weird dichotomy for me because it was both exactly what I thought it would be and surprising at both the same time.  I was expecting a book about a kid who was a zombie but not,,,and that is exactly what it was.  On the other hand, the book was much much darker and grittier and philosophical then I had anticipated.  It was strange to read a book that pretty much did everything I expected it to, and yet still had the power to surprise me with various tidbits and actions.  I also feel like the genre/age group that this book was intended for gets muddled.  The idea of the whole book, leads me to feel like it should be a YA book, but the reality is that I feel it is intended for a bit more of a mature audience

Overall Impression - Almost two weeks later I still haven't gotten a handle of how I really feel about this book.  I know that it made me think, which I love.  I know that it made me spend most of a flight talking Hubbins ear off about various things, also good.  I know that it frustrated me 'cause it could have been even better, the ending could have been phenomenal instead of merely great.  The expectations could have been set differently...who knows...I guess I give the book 7 out of 10 bowels of maggots and recommend it to anybody looking for a good zombie book with a hint of something different.  Happy Reading Everybody!

Fantasy In The City

Hi All, I have just realized how long it's been since I've posted, sorry about that.  To make it up to you, how about a rambling?  Cool.  Now that we are into the best month of the year, I thought I would start us off with some short stories of the urban variety.  A few werewolves and zombies to get this month of awesome started if you will.  The book is The Urban Fantasy Anthology edited by Peter S. Beagle and Joe R. Lansdale.  It was one of my awesome finds at my new used book store.  Shall we get on with it?  Here is a sampling of my favorite stories in the collection.  As always SPOILERS AHEAD!

A Bird That Whistles by Emma Bull - The first story in the collection made me happy right off the bat.  We have a typical urban farie that makes unwordly music meeting up and influencing the life of the young college crowd.  The difference in this story is that instead of your typical human/farie love story, it is actually about an odd sort of friendship between the human musician and the faire one that is not romantic in any way shape or form.  I really enjoyed this different type of fae interaction.

Julie's Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle - A girl with mysterious powers "rescues" a unicorn from a tapestry.  The following adventure shows us what can happen when an ancient mythological creature gets stuck in our modern world.  This feels like a story set in a world that is ongoing, so now I'm gonna try and find the rest of the stories.

A Haunted House of Her Own by Kelley Armstrong - This slightly humorous story features a woman with an inheritance, a potentially haunted B&B, a gruesome murder...and another gruesome murder all culminating in a bit of a twist ending.  I like how this story is set up.  You think it's a potential haunted house story...and it is, just not in the way you think.  Also wifely ghost revenge is the best!

Kitty's Zombie New Year by Carrie Vaughn - A typical New Years party takes a gruesome turn when a woman with a mysterious ailment shows up at the shin-dig.  Our girl Kitty pretty much recognizes this new girl as a zombie of the voodoo slave variety and goes about trying to figure out what happened.  Turns out this poor girls ex boyfriend used a zombie powder he bought on ebay to try and turn his lover into a mindless sex slave, the result of which turns out to be actual zombification.  Perfect for a quick Halloween read.

Boobs by Suzy McKee Charnas - I love this story.  For real, seriously love this story.  Our poor heroine has been dubbed Boobs by her juvenile classmates for her development of...well boobs.  She is humiliated and upset and to make it worse she gets her period for the first time.  Our girl discovers though that instead of her period, she turns into a werewolf...so she has that going for her.  She runs around eating annoying dogs, then moving on to the creep who dubbed her Boobs.  She is now empowered and happy and this story is awesome, seriously go read it.

Gestella by Susan Palwick - So another werewolf story.  This time we have a beautiful European woman by the name of Gestella.  She met an American by the name of Jonathan who essentially tames the young werewolf.  He calls her Stella when she is human and Jessie when she is in wolf form.  He takes her back to the states where she stuns all of his friends.  The problem though is that Stella ages in dog years, seven to one for those who don't know.  As she starts to overtake Jonathan in age, he starts to lose interest and eventually does his worse.  This story is sad and heartbreaking, yet still has some great moments that make it very readable.

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black - This is a short story that I think was the basis for the book.  This story however has different characters and a different story, so that made me happy 'cause I loved the book and this was like a bit of bonus.  It follows a girl who has been bitten and infected and tries to beat it, but eventually purposely succumbs to help save the sister of a friend.  She ends up a permanent resident of Coldtown and starts her own campaign against the infection.  Good times were had by all.

I felt this collection was pretty hit or miss for my own personal taste.  The stories I liked, I really really liked, the rest of them I felt suffered from a bit of esoteric existentialism.  This is a problem I sometimes run into when I read Urban Fantasy stories in their various forms is that the author's can too easily get into the urban angst, or go into borderline nonsensical.  All that being said, I did enjoy a number of the stories here, and am now going to go look up several of these authors to read more, which makes this a very successful book.  I give it 7 out 10 zombiewolfwitchghosts and recommend it to anybody trying to get into the widespread genre that is Urban Fantasy.  Happy Reading Everybody!

Heaving Bosoms And The Undead

My friend L called this weekend wanting to see the new Pride and Prejudice and Zombies movie "based" (note the quotes) on the book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame - Smith and Jane Austen which is an undead take on Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen...did you catch all that?  I LOVE LOVE LOVE Pride and Prejudice, and was actually quit pleased with the book Pride, Prejudice and Zombies, so I agreed to go.  After bribing him with Vanilla Caramel Bourbon Milkshakes (seriously Heaven in a chilled glass) Hubbin agreed to come with.  The movie was actually a lot of fun.  It did not really follow either book, but it did pay homage to it many times along with the original Colin Firth BBC version of the movie (seriously at one point the new Darcy does the whole white shirt into the water scene).

Where the book did it's best to essentially BE Pride and Prejudice as written just now with zombies, the movie decided to take on a bit of a different story line, adding in many battles and a four horse men/redeemable zombies sub-plot that was a bit confusing but did make for some great gothic battle scenes.  The casting was pretty spot on, with all the right people being young, beautiful and spunky.  My favorite casting was Lena Headey as Lady Catherine de Bourgh...even if they totally changed the character.  Over all the movie felt like a cheeky modern take on the Jane Austen era as a whole, with a loose arc of Pride and Prejudice laid over the top. There were tons of heaving bosoms barely restrained by corsets, dashing soldiers chopping at zombies and enough high class snark to please any Austenite.  I probably should not have enjoyed it as much as I did as it completely butchered both books...yet I had to give mad props to the pluck and fun of it all.  I have to think that if Jane Austen were alive today, these prim, proper and crazy characters would land within her scope and she too would enjoy the film.  I am not ashamed to say that I really had a good time watching this movie and will probably watch it again, just for the fun of it.  Happy Reading Everybody!

Schizophrenic Writing Of The Dead

In case you all haven't noticed, I love atmosphere.  I love to read just the right book, at the right time, in the right place, for the right mood and no month is more atmospheric then October.  To this end I picked up the book Death Watch by Ari Berk because both the cover and the description sounded perfect for a dreary October afternoon.  Unfortunately a lack of focus made this book less then it should have been, but first as always SPOILERS AHEAD!

I will do my best with this synopsis, but I have to warn you that this book was all over the place.  As best as I can tell there is a town called Lichport that has some sort of deal where the dead wander all over the place in various forms.  We get zombie like creatures, ghosts, ghouls and people who just refuse to be dead.  Enter the Umbers, an old family from Lichport who take on the role of Undertaker, who's job it is...well...I'm still not 100% sure what their job is.  I think an Undertaker is their mostly to help the dead along, fix troublesome dead people, and chit chat with the dead who hang around and are helpful.  The story part comes in when we meet Sila Umber, a teenage boy who just recently graduated from high school.  Silas is an odd duck, there is no real reason given, other
then he is weird.  Silas's mother has done her best to force his father to appear to lead a normal life.  The family lives in Saltbridge, a town close to Lichport.  Silas's mother insists that no word about his fathers real work be told to him, and Lichport is rarely mentioned in their home.  One day Silas's father does not come home.  Silas's mother does her best to keep things normal, but her excessive drinking and inability to understand her son makes her mean.  They move back to Lichport to live with Silas's rich Uncle (who is brother to his father) and right away he senses something is wrong.  He eventually discovers the house that his father worked out of while he was in Lichport and is given the keys and free reign to it by Mrs. Bowe a woman who helps the Undertaker with his ambiguous work. Silas finds a watch in his father's belongings that when stopped allows him to see the dead in their spirit forms.  The watch is called a Death Watch and is one of a zillion partially explained artifact that an Undertaker can use in his work.  About 37 different storylines appear and disappear through out the book.  In the end I guess part of what happened was that Silas's Uncle had a son who died and he has spent the last couple of years killing people to try and appease his ghost, including his wife, and Silas's dad.  He wanted to figure out a way to keep Silas with him, thinking that giving his ghost kid a "brother" would some how make him happy.  Uncle is chased out by assorted ghosts, ghouls, living, dead, zombies and birds that had something to do with the story and he eventually was trapped aboard a ghost ship of evil people...which also had its own partial storyline.  Silas takes up his dad's work and there are two more books to confuse us with.

This book took me forever to get through. It was long, meandering, and never really went anywhere. The overwhelming feel of the book was that the author had all of these ideas and stories and really wanted to get every single one of them into the book.  He also seemed to want to get every type of death ritual ever performed in the whole entire world a bit of spotlight.  All of this combined with the feel that the author was trying to keep us in suspense through out the whole book made it fell very muddy and boggy.  All of this could have actually worked if his editors had made him flow the story a little more.  I think the main story needed fleshing out and to flow beginning to end, with the rites and stories put in as vignettes or prefaces to the different chapters.  Instead it was all mixed together until you could not tell if what you were reading was part of the story, or a separate story, or if they had anything to do with each other at all.  These little mini-stories were not even kept together, even these were broken into pieces and scattered through out the other stories, so I spent a lot of time trying to piece everything together, with no real pay-off.  The town of Lichport itself caused me a lot of problems.  I think the author was trying to make the town its own character, which I have seen

done very well before so it is possible.  Unfortunately the town did not make a whole lot of sense.  It also suffered from way too much going on.  In some places old houses were inhabited by zombies that were not zombies, other places had crumbled into ghoulish unsafe place, there are random ghosts, some friendly some not, there are marshes that are haunted by mother/bird combo's, a pond that has a very frisky ghost that may or may not have anything to do with the story, there are random undefined beings that are helpful sometimes...or not.  There are also a very few living people who all except Uncle are keen to help Silas in his undefined work.  There are no rules at all for this town, there is random tidbits of history, but nothing to actually tell us what the heck is going on.  You also get the feeling that the undead WAY outnumber the living, and that the living are all leaving at some point anyways...which makes me ask what you need an Undertaker for if you are all on your way out?    The most frustrating thing about this book is that it could have been really cool and perfect for Halloween/Fall.   If the author had done better organizing the various stories, maybe added an appendixes for the parts that were not easily explainable in prose, and limited his stories to a few well told ones, instead of a zillion fragments I think it could have been a great book.  Alas as it stands this book is a great idea, but way to scattered and nebulous to be read with any real enjoyment.  I will have to give this book 5 out of 10 honey preserved bodies.  I do however seem to be in the minority as I know there have been several glowing reviews, which is awesome.  This is the best thing about books, I can think one thing, you can think another and we all get to decide for ourselves, YAY BOOKS!
What makes or breaks a book for you?  Is there such thing as too many stories?  Am I just not smart enough for this book?

Cloned Blogger

Just so everybody knows, I was originally going to call this book incestuous necrophiliac, but decided I would probably get the wrong kind of audience :-)  What the heck am I talking about you ask?  This is the post where I ramble about Blackout, the third book in the Newsflesh trilogy by Mira Grant.  It has taken me a while to finally finish this series, but here we go.  As always SPOILERS AHEAD!

We left our group being chased by zombie virus infested mosquito's.  Florida has essentially fallen to the zombies and the country is once again in chaos.  Shaun has been bitten by a zombie, and has recovered, make him immune to the Kellis-Amberly virus.  He and his team decide to go and find out just what the heck happened with the mosquito's, as they suspect that they were released on purpose as a distraction from the news story the crew was going to break about the intentional killing of the reservoir condition people, and the attempt to infect people with a stable strain of the Kellis-Amberly virus.  If this is all a bit technical and confusing...well that's how I felt too :-).  Meanwhile Georgia wakes up in a secure CDC facility and learns that she is the most recent in a line of clones that the CDC has produced to try and control Shaun and his crew.  The plan is to make a stable version of Georgia and then mess with her brain enough to control her.  Part of this plan involves surgeries to make the clone Georgia more like the original as they cannot make a clone with the retinal reservoir condition the original Georgia had.  Eventually Georgia II as she calls herself is rescued and finally gets to meet up with Shaun.  Understandably the team, Shaun and even Georgia herself have some reservations about just how much of Georgia is left in the clone.  According to the scientists who created her Georgia II is a 97% match for the original.  After some questions and such they all end up at the White House where President Ryman and his vice-president, the former Newsie Rick attempt to use Georgia against Shaun and his team to repress the news that there will never be a cure for the zombie disease, just a treatment.  The CDC, apart from wanting to keep all the power, believe that the general public will freak if they know there is no cure.  They want Shaun and his team to essentially be the mouth pieces of the government, to only put out what the CDC wants them to, and they are willing to threaten everybody including the president to do it.  Luckily for our team, vice-president Rick has other plans and helps take down the CDC guy and with the help of some friends restores the truth.  The story breaks and everybody who didn't die goes back home to try and live the rest of their lives.  Georgia and Shaun reveal that they are lovers as well as brother and sister (hence the incestuous necrophiliac joke...it makes sense in the book, I promise) and disappear, presumably to Canada.  Life continues and our trilogy ends.

Where to start, where to start.  In the first book we had Georgia as our narrator, in the second book Shaun took over, in this book they switch back and forth.  I have always liked Georgia's voice better, I'm not sure if it is because Shaun is a bit more emotional and broody, or I prefer Georgia's more factual take, but in this book I liked her chapters best.   I also liked Georgia's chapters because they seemed to go somewhere, where Shaun and his team seemed to be going around in circles alot.   You definitely need to read the first two books to understand this book, and for a couple of things relating to why the CDC was after Shaun and his team I had to go back and look up.  For Shaun, I liked that the Georgia in his head did not go away when Georgia II showed up, showing us just how far gone he had been.  I do wonder however why when he saw the Georgia in his head manifest, he saw her without the retinal Kellis-Amberly when he had never seen her without it.  I liked following Georgia II as she learned she was one of several clones, was experimented on, and eventually came to grips with what she was.  I was not a huge fan of the whole lover thing between Georgia and Shaun, even though I saw it coming in the first book.  I know they are not technically related, but...I don't know I still found it a bit icky.  I liked the questions raised with both the scientific and emotional

ramifications of cloning.  I liked how they acknowledged that Georgia II was NOT Georgia, but for some purposes, especially for Shaun, she was good enough.  Overall I liked this book better then the second one, but not as much as the first.  Now that I have finished it, I would like to talk over the series as a whole.  I love the world the author has created, I like that it is not your typical survivalist, living in the woods, shooting zombies to survive type of world, but more of a continuing life with zombies, but I still want my Starbucks type of world.  It is still a unique take, and I really like it.  I also still appreciate the "science" (I put that in quotes, because it is fictional) that the author used to make the virus plausible to those of us who are super nit-picky.  I did find that the three books had a bit of lack of consistency as far as the story line went.  The first book was so focused on the campaign, that when it was barely acknowledged in the second book, and only really brought in at the end of the third book, it felt a bit disjointed.  I know the real story was about the virus conspiracy with the CDC, but that felt scattered to me as well. To me it felt as if each book was telling a different story without it being successfully tied together, but that may be just me.  I also felt that when dealing with Shaun and his crew, it took a really long time for them to get anywhere, it felt like they did a lot of hurry up and wait while the rest of the story caught up or progressed.  I did like the series as a whole, and think that the author is a superb writer.  I enjoyed all three books to varying degrees. I give this book a 7 out of 10 zombie clones and give the series as a whole 7 out of 10 virus tests.
What do you think about unrelated siblings getting it on?  What series have you read that is better when looked at as a whole?  Should I have tempted fate and used incestuous necrophiliac as a post title?

Zzzzombie

This is what I feel like today

I need to get some sleep :-)

Walking, Sleeping, Biting Dead

HAPPY HALLOWEEN to all of you ghosties, ghouglies, witches, mummies and zombies out there.  Hope everyone survived the storm ok, and if you are in one of the hard hit areas, my thoughts and prayers are with you.  I have to say all of this disaster just reminds me that one must be prepared for the ultimate disaster THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE (hence forth known as ZA).
In preparation for this event I have been watching every zombie movie I can get my hands on, reading my Zombie Survival Guide and keeping my Zombie Kit stocked. I have also been watching The Walking Dead tv show (which may or may not have gotten me on this whole zombie kick to start with). Of course this series is based on a book, which of course means I now have to read it.  This story is a bit different from my norm as it is in graphic novel form.  I have to admit I love graphic novels, ever since my friend used to sneak in whole backpacks full of them into our World Cultures class in high school, and we used to spend the whole class time reading them under our desks I have been in love with this form of story telling.  I like how in a graphic novel you can sum up a story with way less words then in a conventional book.  Don't get me wrong, I LOVE LOVE LOVE words, but sometimes, especially if action is a big part of the story, words can gum up the pacing a bit.  In a graphic novel you don't have to describe the eerily serene, yet empty gated community using a whole paragraph, you can just show it in a panel.  You rarely have to reiterate things 'cause they are constantly shown, and lets face it SEEING a zombie get it's head bashed in is so much more satisfying then reading about it.

This brings me to The Walking Dead graphic novels I have been reading, I am just finishing Compendium One which is the first 48 issues of this series.  I usually like to wait until most of the series has been written, because I am very impatient and rip through the little issues way to fast.  I also like having a lot of issues collected in one book for connivance purposes.  I am loving the pacing of this series, after watching the hit and miss pacing of the show (season 1 AWESOME, season 2 SUCKS ((until the end then it got AWESOME)), season 3 OH MY GOSH IT IS SO COOL I CAN"T WAIT UNTIL NEXT WEEK SERIOUSLY SHOULD HAVE BEEN LIKE THIS THE WHOLE TIME!) the graphic novel definitely has a more quick, even frantic pace.  I love that the TV show does not feel the need to follow the graphic novel to closely so no matter which one you read/watch first your not going to spoil it for yourself. I give a little
more leniency in tv shows that are adapted from books then I do to movies, because I feel tv shows are more "inspired" by source material than they are trying to translate the book into a single movie which I expect to at least attempt to follow the original story line.  The graphic novel is in black and white, which lends a more...not sure how to put it...surreal, fuzzy line, psycho feel to it.  Anyways I'm starting to ramble (possibly because I stayed up to late reading zombie novels) and I will end this here, if you like blood, guts, gore, and zombies then go read this graphic novel. Be warned it is for the 16 and over crowd only, it is all about every adult situation you can possibly imagine so keep that in mind.  Also pay attention to the good and bad survival skills that are presented, it may save your life one day when the ZA comes upon us!

What is your strategy for surviving the ZA?  What do you think about TV shows straying from the source material?  Who is your favorite character on the show/book?  Does it change from show to book?  Do you also want to see Lori fed to the zombies?

Zombie Survival Kit

How awesome is my baby sis?!?  She MADE me this super cool Zombie Survival Kit book bag!

Yep she put the whole thing together all by herself and filled it with all of the things I would need to survive the pending Zombie Apocalypse or ZA as we call it around here

She gave me detailed instructions on the use of all the different survival items (including fake body parts to lure the zombies into a trap of pop rocks!) and a letter giving me all the sad (yet highly entertaining) highlights of her and her Hubby's last days (zombie Lola for the WIN!)

The bag itself is my favorite part (it is coming with me as my new book back for the fire station).  Not only is it AWESOME! (sorry the caps key is just SCREAMING my name today) but it fits at least one large hard cover, two paperbacks, my e-reader with charger, and even a magazine or two, you know for in between zombie slayings. It is pretty durable so I can toss it in the back of my ambulance without worrying about the seams splitting, so I'm pretty excited about that.  Thanks Baby Sis for combining my love of blood and gore with my love of all things readable (and Sixlets...I mean anti-zombie viral pills) into one of my favorite presents EVER.

What does your ZA survival kit include?  What books do you think I should take for the ZA?  How freaked out will my patients be to see this in the back of my unit?