SHOCKTOBER Zom-B series by Darren Shan YP FIC SHAN

Having already reviewed the super awesome Zom-B, I waited for three more volumes to do an update. Just in time for Shocktober!

SPOILER ALERT: Do NOT read this review if you don't want Zom-B Volume 1's big secrets revealed.







B (AKA Becky, that's right twist ending B is a girl lady!!!) wakes up months after being attacked by a zombie and having her HEART RIPPED OUT OF HER CHEST!!!  Now she is a Zom-B, but unlike the shuffling masses she has her memories and her own mind.  Unfortunately, she is a prisoner/test subject of a secretive military force that is keeping her Underground. She may just find that there really are fates worse than death!

B has left the underground military installation (NO SPOILERS ON HOW!) and is roaming the ravaged remains of London.  Holding as best she can to the semblance of humanity as she tries to find other survivors and escape the horrors of the dead, the living, and the worst: The mutants and the demonic clown of death, Mr. Dowling.





B has been found by others like her. Revitalized, zombies that think.  They call themselves the angels and say they can save the world, but can she trust them? And is she willing to walk away from the only people left on Earth that are like her?







This series is getting better, creepier, gorier, and more nightmare inducing.  It's already up to four volumes with a fifth volume soon to hit our shelves, so you have some catching up to do.  however, with Halloween around the corner this is the perfect time!  Each volume is a quick read, that leaves you wanting to tear open a fresh volume like the shambling undead tear open skulls!  Sorry, that was a little gross, but NOTHING compared to the fiendish horrors and atrocities that Shan has nightmared up for us! Mr. Dowling is absolute nightmare fuel and every time he shows up something gut wrenching (often literally) is sure to happen.  It filled we with a perverse sense of dread and eagerness to see what he would do next, which is the perfect thing in a horror book.  I think Shan has really got a great protagonist with street tough B.  She's just good enough and bad enough to both root for and be believable.  Shan has also populated the world with some fascinatingly freaky survivors for her to run into and keeps thing fresh by introducing just enough new faces to feel lively without getting confusing as to who is who.  It helps that he often slaughters loads of characters to keep you on your toes.  Sometimes I think that the REAL zombie plague is how many new zombie books and movies keep coming out, but this is one of the few shining stars in the field.  Its fast paced, creepy, gross, and filled with some truly clever twists.

You can find Zom-B: Underground in our catalog here.
Zom-B: City in our catalog here.
Zom-B: Angels in our catalog here.

Zombies attacked the library! WE SURVIVED!

AUUUUUUUUGH! ZOMBIES! Wait. We totally got this!  we have mad zombie survival skills because we went to How to Survive a Zombie Attack!

We started by learning about the art of camouflage.  If zombies think you're one of them you'll be safe! Zombies never eat their own!  Which makes sense because while I'm sure humans are delicious, zombies taste terrible. Once we were disguised we practiced our zombie shambling. 



Afterwards we did a preparedness drill. We broke into teams and had to fill our backpack with the seven best items for a zombie apocalypse.  Teams showed great strategic thinking and speed! Winners received awesome travel journals to record their (probably final) thoughts about living in a world of the dead!  Afterwards we all got zombie disaster kit checklists from the Center of Disease Control.  The CDC knows zombies are coming!  We also realized that they'd work for hurricanes too.  

Afterwards we tested our knowledge of zombie books and movies, because we must understand our enemy to defeat our enemy. Our zombie hunter to the right won both the Zombie Walk Off and the Zombie Fiction Trivia!!!  I know who I'm following when the zombies shuffle through the library doors!


Last but certainly not least, we tested out ACTUAL zombie survival skills with a Zombie Survival Quiz.  It looked at everything! the best weapons, rides, strategies, philosophies, clothes, and more to survive a wide array of possible zombie scenarios.  After the quiz everyone got one of Young Adult Librarian Luke's Zombie Survival Tips to get some basics down.  It was hours of fun and horror!  


If you missed it, we still have some awesome zombie mini posters, zombie supply checklists, and zombie bibliographies (book lists) at the reference desk.  And if you think this looks like fun, wait until Minute to Win It III on Wednesday, July 31st at 2 PM!  We'll compete for honor, glory, and prizes in games of ridiculous skill and hilarious silliness! Get your FREE ticket starting Wednesday, July 24th. 

Zom-B by Darren Shan YP FIC SHAN

Everyone thought it was a joke, a hoax, anything but real.  There’s no such thing as zombies.  B just puts it out of her mind and tries to go about her ‘normal’ life.  But B is wondering more and more how normal her life really is.  She tells herself that even though B's dad is a bigot and has a short fuse, he’s basically okay, but more and more B has to face the evil from inside B's dad and inside.  That’s only if B survives!  Turns out flesh eating zombies ARE real and they’re really hungry!

Okay, I totally get that there are about 18 billion zombie books on the market right now, so it is pretty difficult to wade through the moaning hordes of books.  But Darren Shan is a no-brainer for writing a zombie series!  He is the absolute king of modern gross out teen horror!  And he has made a bold and bloody claim to have the best zombie series out there.  What I love is that this book starts with a bloody bang of zombie mayhem, then switches gears and looks at B’s day to day life and what makes B tick.  And B is not our typical hero.  B’s seriously conflicted about following in B's father’s racist footsteps, but too scared to challenge the life B has.  And that conflict is interesting enough even before zombies start ripping people’s brains out!  And the bloody, gruesome violence will not let down Darren Shan fans or any zombie lovers that like their action fast and brutal.  The central mystery of what is causing the outbreaks and who the mystery figure that B calls Owl Man and what makes the mutants different form the zombies will have to be solved in future volumes.  The book definitely ends with a heart-rending climax that will leave readers drooling for the next title.

I’d say that this is the first zombie horror series that stands up to my all-time favorite zombie series The Enemy books by Charlie Higson.  Weird that they both take place in England! The Brits have a lockdown on my favorite zombie fiction! This is the first part of a 12 part series, but you’ll rip through the slender volumes so fast you’ll be left wanting more.  Fortunately, Shan promises a volume every 3 months and we already have Underground the second book in the series. I’ll definitely be following this one and will keep you all recapped after a few more volumes to let you know how the mystery unfolds.

You can check our catalog for Zom-B here.

Blood Ninja III: The Betrayal of the Living by Nick Lake YP FIC LAKE

The evil Lord Oda is dead (after already being dead, then undead, and now totally dead), but Taro’s greatest challenge is still ahead.  He must vanquish a dragon in order to get permission to marry the girl he loves.  Wait fighting dragons to win the heart of a fair lady is supposed to be for knights, nit vampire ninjas!?  Taro is doomed!  As if that wasn’t enough to worry about the dead are rising.  No, not vampires, ZOMBIES!  The super, evil and very creepy Kenji has crawled back from the dead and is raising an army of corpses to destroy all he sees.  OH!  Also, Taro’s very own flesh and blood family plans to betray him!  Being a vampire ninja in feudal Japan is ROUGH!

Vampire ninjas VS Dragons and Zombies!  What’s not to love!? This is a great finale to a wonderful action series.  This book, like the two before it (read my reviews here and here), have loads of fast paced action and ultra-violence, perfectly evil villains to root for, and enough plot twists to keep things interesting.  Also, Nick Lake does a nice amount of research to make the Japanese setting feel real and authentic.  Basically the Blood Ninja series is like a super awesome manga series without the pictures.  It doesn’t have the most realistic characters, but they aren’t boring or entirely one note either.  The heroes are almost always outmatched and that makes for tense and exciting action sequences.  The romantic plot does get a little sparkly when Taro learns that he can’t be with Hana without turning her into a vampire, but that never drags the plot down to a soap opera.  This is a must read for fans of action, manga, or historical-fiction-fantasy-horror.

You can check our catalog for Blood Ninja III here.

Infinite Kung Fu by Kagan Mcleod YP FIC MCLEOD

The world we know has ended and a new world governed by the mystic arts and kung fu has replaced it.  The balance of life and death is off kilter and the dead rise from the grave because the cycle of reincarnation cannot be completed. Now a Ghost Emperor and his generals seek the armor that can return him to life so he can destroy the world.  Only Lei Kung, a lowly foot soldier, can learn long forgotten secret arts and save all life on Earth.

This book had me with zombie kung fu fighting, but it offers so much more. Disco kung fu masters, using detachable limbs as weapons, martial arts that make people explode, shaolin robot training, and more and more and more awesome ridiculousness.  This perfectly captures the feeling of finding an insane kung fu movie on at 3am and watching it get crazier and crazier and never believing your own eyes.  The storyline has plenty of melodramatic twists and turns, the kung fu is first rate, and the fluid Asian-inspired brushwork makes it a one of a kind visual feast.  This is a must read for any kung fu fan and will likely make kung fu fans of most any one that reads it.    

Check our catalog for Infinite Kung Fu here.

Ashes by Ilsa J. Bick YP FIC BICK

Ashes

Alex went on a trip to the woods to say goodbye to her dead parents and to prepare for death herself.  The Monster in her brain that keeps growing and growing won’t keep her from one last trip, but a strange pulse changes all that: Changes everything.  Good news: she has her sense of smell back and no headaches.   Bad news: everyone except people middle aged or older have turned into mindless, flesh eating beasts.  Now Alex, a young girl she has sworn to protect, and a mysterious young man named Tom have to face the woods, the beasts, and most dangerous of all: adults.

This is my favorite zombie book of the year hands down.  It is gory, grisly, gruesome, and has excellently realized characters and a slowly built up sense of tension and dread.  The slowly built romance between Tom and Alex feels real and earned and enhances the plot instead of seeming tacked on to get more readers.  The different adult villains are just as creepy and menacing as the zombies and Bick smartly starts out with very few zombie attacks at first, so that every encounter is chilling.  This is great hooror, great dystopian fiction, and just a great story filled with believable and interesting characters.  I highly recommend it to almost everyone.  

I have two warnings: First, if you have a weak stomach for gore you might want to skip this one, or at least the gorier pages. Second, there is a big change in storyline and characters in the book about 2/3s of the way through and ends on a sort of unresolved note.  A lot of people may be thrown by this or even angry.  I think it works for the overall story, but your mileage may vary.

Daybreak by Brian Ralph

Daybreak

You are one of the remaining few.  Surrounded on all sides by the undead you rely solely on your new one-armed friend to guide you through the apocalyptic wasteland in the best first-person zombie comic of the year!

This book takes a rather sizable risk from the very first panel: it breaks the fourth wall.  Meaning a character looks directly into the panel and addresses the audience.  This is a first-person comic, so the main character (you) never speaks and we never see you.  This may strike some readers as gimmicky and I’m sure some people will prefer a hero we can see, but I loved the novel attempt to immerse the reader. The art is cartoony and unique. Ralph uses super thick and scratchy outlines and empty white space with just a few scratch marks for detail.  It makes for a look that is both cluttered and spare and fits very well for an apocalyptic look.  The characters for the most part are a bit stock to the zombie genre, but Ralph has a real sense of pacing and dialogue that had me care about the story anyways.  The one exception is your nameless one-armed guide.  He is a funny, unusual, and ultimately tragic figure that I found myself rooting for and missing whenever he wasn’t on screen. He is in many ways the hero of the story and the first person narrative is just a way to view things differently.  This isn’t going to be for all comic or zombie fans and it is a little on the short side, but if you want something truly different, take a risk with Daybreak.

iZombie: Dead to the World by Chris Roberson Illustrated by Michael Allred YP FIC ROBERSON

Gwen Dylan feels like her entire life is a dead end, but that’s not surprising since she’s a zombie. Fortunately, she only has to chow down on brains once a month to keep from going all drooly, and her grave digging job even lets her keep from noshing on the living.  Of course there is a catch.  She gets the last memories of the brain she devours.  When her latest meal was a murder victim, she has to solve the mystery.  With the help of her hep cat stuck in the 60s ghost friend and wereterrier buddy she tracks down a mysterious mummy that warns her that she has an amazing gift and powerful enemies.

iZombie is funny, quirky, odd, and very cool while never seeming like its ‘trying too hard’.  A great deal of credit goes to the artwork of Michael ‘Madman’ Allred.  His quirky silver age inspired line work adds flair to every book he’s ever worked on.  The weird mythology of monsters hidden from human society and hunted by secret organizations is far from original and is only saved by the oddness and humor in how it is presented.  My one gripe is that there is a totally unnecessary undressing scene in the first issue.  It’s pure pandering and pretty insulting to the audience that we won’t keep reading without gratuitous cheesecake panels.  Beyond that one ill-advised page, I think that Gwen is a great character and this is an interesting new world for Roberson to explore.  As evidenced by this and his Cinderella book, Roberson has a knack for writing believable leading ladies.  Comic fans that are looking for something different and cool of both genders should pick this one up.