I, Zombie: So good, I’m blogging about it twice

OK, it’s time I gave this site some content. Real new content will follow soon, but I made the following review as a part of my Real Blog plan before the excellent Lou Morgan helped me to find my way to Word Press. I really felt that the book deserved to be reviewed somewhere slightly more upmarket than my semi-aborted Dreamwidth account. Anyway:

I, Zombie: A Review

Part of my recent trip to FantasyCon involved a rather awesome sounding Heavy Metal Karaoke event, which Abaddon Books had organised to help promote a book, which they were giving out free. Sadly, the karaoke apparently didn’t start until two hours after the start time, by which point we’d left. However, the free book was well worth it. I, Zombie is one of the best new books I’ve read in a long time. This really surprised me. I’m not that into zombies. I want to be – they tend to go along with post-apocalypse settings, and those are some of my very favourite things – but I’m not. It also sounded like part of the general run of ‘humourous’ zombie books that have been popular recently, and didn’t really grab me. However, I was more than pleasantly surprised.

The main character of I, Zombie is a zombie. He’s also a hired assassin or other sort of go-to man you might need to do something violent. He’s not shambling or stupid, he’s just dead. And he likes to eat brains, although he doesn’t like to think about that. He’s also thoroughly likable, despite the fact that he’s clearly very violent, and very definitely also a monster. He woke up dead ten years ago with no memory, a very shiny sword, and the anonymous identity of ‘John Doe’. The central mystery of the book is who and what he really is, and why he is that way. The truth is surprising, original, and very cool; although I’ll confess that I enjoyed the first half of the novel more, when I didn’t know the truth, if only because it contained more of John Doe, whose personality and situation are really what bring the book a cut above the average.

Buy it, I think you’d like it.

To read the rest of my account of FantasyCon itself, go here: http://rhube.dreamwidth.org/4135.html

Since this time, I have been gifted with Nekropolis, from the awesome Lee Harris, whose Angry Robot ticket I rode to FantasyCon. It is also a zombie novel, and I very much enjoyed reading it. I plan to produce a proper review of this (one way or another) soon.