Welcome to Deadland by Zachery Tyler Linville
Look at that cover!!!
I thought this was going to be a book about surviving the zombie apocalypse but it spends so much time exploring teenage sexuality, romance and the ‘before’ that you essentially have two very disconnected narratives, neither of which end particularly satisfyingly and an ‘after’ which feels a bit too familiar.
It’s an interesting time to write a book about Zombies. In pop culture they have never been more popular thanks to the outlandish success of The Walking Dead which guarantees an audience but the flip side is it can be tough to conjure a situation that that audience has not already seen. I found that to be case reading this book. None of the zombie based scenes particularly thrilled me and I never found myself quite knowing what the rules were in terms of speed, intention, aggressiveness and strength. Now this is totally understandable as all zombies are unique individuals, in various states of decay or injury and at different points in their transformation but when I’m building an action scene in my mind I need to know some of the consistent physics so I can see it playing out.
We have two major POV’s in Asher and Rico with both being split into ‘before’ and ‘after’. We Let talk about Asher first.
Meet Asher. He works in a coffee shop. He is quickly asked out by Stacey. He goes to a party with her and meets Ellis.
Ellis extended his hand. When Asher shook it, he felt a shock like jolt shoot up his arm.
One minute later
His eyes moved from person to person in the circle and fell on Asher. “So what d’you say? Be my date?” Ellis smiled and batted his eyelashes.
Two minutes later they are skinny dipping whilst Asher’s date lies passed out and Ellis ignores any sense of personal space by constantly swimming up behind Asher and ‘surprising him from behind’.
So Ellis is gay. Yay. Asher is dating a girl but the author has expressly told me that he felt a jolt in his arm when he shook Ellis hand so he must be gay too. We’ll nothing moves things forward like answering a text from a relative stranger by giving him a nice visual of a dripping wet naked body and telling him you have just got out of the shower and are getting dressed. Is this Nightmare on Elm Street 2? Arghhh where are the zombies?
In the next scene Ellis is buying Asher smoothies and discussing movies insisting that “we’ll have to watch the rest then’ and then eating so much and declaring 'he needs to take his shorts off' and this is what I don’t understand. Just because Ellis is gay why does he have to be hyper sexual. Everything is a bloody double entendre and at no point has Asher thought to turn around and asked him to respect his relationship with Stacey, or even called him out for treating his boyfriend like crap.
The dialogue between supposed friends is clunky and does not ring true.
“You’ll mess up my kill ratio,” Mark said, refusing to pass the controller. “Whenever you play you end up shooting me, not the other players,” Derrick added “Dammit, sniper got me” “That’s not true. Besides, I’m excellent with a gun,” Asher protested.
I’m not a writer but here’s my take on a scene like this where you have two roommates playing a Call of Duty style game.
“No. You’re crap,” Mark said, refusing to pass the controller. “Yeah whenever you play his k/d ratio goes to shit and he ends up with an eight year old from Peru telling him he sucks,” Derrick added. “ You camping sniping son of a bitch!” he yelled at the screen as he was forced to live out a replay of his head getting blown off by a player who was wearing bright orange fatigues that he had not even seen. “Come on. Let me get the shotgun out and go do some work,” Asher protested.
The only reason I can find for these two side characters to exist is because them blowing stuff up gives Ellis a chance to make a joke about blow jobs. Anyway after 120 pages of innuendo Ellis shockingly confides in Asher that he is gay and decides that Asher is too and that he is going to expose him. What an awesome guy. Not content with respecting the wishes of Asher, giving him time and space to come out on his own or even entertaining the thought that he might be bi or just getting his shit together he just sets out to ruin his relationship with Stacey.
The other major POV is a guy called Rico. In his ‘before’ he is selfish and takes a lot of drugs, in his ‘after’ he is looking after a young boy and trying to keep him safe from the zombies. We later learn the young boy is his step brother and about the only thing that was good in his life. We see some signs of him having an abusive father but unfortunately just when this thread begins it is abandoned because Rico was high.
I’m not a big fan of romance in my books but I love Fantasy, Sci-FI, Action and Thrillers and there is always an element of romance. It’s something that can add a great deal too most stories. However when I picked up this book I had no way of knowing that more than a third of it would be dominated by a love story between two teenage boys, one of which is a manipulative stalker In all honesty if I had I probably would not have picked it up as that just does not interest me.
I received a copy of this book from the publishers and it in no way affected my review
