Bernard Jan's Blog - Posts Tagged "zombies"

Of Life, Death, Aliens and Zombies by Dario Cannizzaro

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Dario Cannizzaro is a 35-year-old writer from Naples who managed to mislead me with the title of his collected stories Of Life, Death, Aliens and Zombies and a completely black cover of his book outlined with red images of a syringe, stars, planet Saturn, a cross, a profile of a woman, a naked female body, a hand digging out its way through earth, a spaceship, a pierced heart, and a cloud dialogue with xxx in it. My mind was sidetracked into believing that I will be reading gory, horror stories of aliens, zombies, death celebrated and life taken, so I embraced myself for this dark and short journey.

I was so wrong. And I wouldn't put a blame for it on Dario Cannizzaro for choosing this title and Vico for “lending his design talent” for this book cover. Actually, now when I reflect on everything that I've read in nine stories on 104 pages (Preface, Thank you and Bio & Contacts pages included), they are rather logical and smartly chosen. Only my dark and twisted mind has been looking forward to the rivers of blood and aliens and zombies hunting down the remaining surviving specimens of mankind!

Cannizzaro's stories are indeed stories about life, death, alien and zombies. They are stories about everyday life as we know it, life as it could be if things went slightly different (e.g. zombies walking among us, Pope admitting that aliens are gods we have been worshiping since the dawn of mankind), life and death that continue its perpetual circle despite the fact that aliens are watching us and we don't care much about it after the first initial shock of finding the truth that is out there, or that zombies are our new neighbors even though we do not see or hear them so we carry on with our daily life, normal as it can be under the new circumstances.

Cannizzaro's stories are also stories about love, passion and sex. In some we can so vividly taste the smells, fragrances and the bloodstream of Italy, in others we are faced with our own basic instincts, aspirations, cravings, hopes, dreams and memories. Some of them are not even two pages long, while others are a more complex and maybe even more demanding reading. All of them, though, are carefully written with Cannizzaro's beautiful style and meticulously chosen words and sentences.

Three of my favorite stories are Yet Another Zombie Apocalypse, The Best Place to Plan a Mass Shooting and The Announcement. If that describes me as an aspiring and sometimes misunderstood author who is scared shitless of zombies and hopes for aliens to come to his rescue, so be it. This is who I am. But these stories carry the weight of a deeper truth and hypothetical and yet not-so-alien reality, if we only allow ourselves to think outside the box we have been put and locked into.

There is one particular story I wanted to mention at the end and I am sure there is a good reason why the author saved it to end his first book of collected stories with it as well. Impurita is the most complex and in-depth story of them all, but what truly separates it and places it on a special pedestal is the beauty and love with which it is written, a strong and deep emotion and the poetry in every sentence through which it speaks to us. Would calling it a literary masterpiece be an exaggeration? I hope you will be able to tell me that after you read it.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



View all my reviews

The Scattered and the Dead by Tim McBain

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


That surprises come in small packages we can say with certainty for The Scattered and the Dead by Tim McBain and L.T. Vargus. But don't be too much surprised to see that this review, despite my best intentions, contains some spoilers.

The Scattered and the Dead (Book 0.5) has only 162 pages, but each page is carefully and meticulously thought over. It starts with the young man John Decker, who is writing a letter to an unknown girl (his neighbor), in a very unusual manner. He tells her that he sees her, sometimes feels like he knows her but he doesn't know how to say hi to her. Immediately after the opening sentences he starts describing to her the painful and realistically graphic death of his mother.

Decker is an introvert and he cannot fit into society. Even though he is good with saving money, he lives in his fortress of an apartment, where he is anonymous and no one knows about him. He is writing a letter to the girl three doors down across the hall, with whom he is trying to make a contact while watching the world go to shit on TV. The world is facing apocalypse, people are bleeding to death, zombies are eating people's faces, and he doesn't know how to connect with anyone.

He has endless supplies ordered from Amazon and he feels rather safe in his apartment when the face of the world, and consequently his life, rapidly changes. New deliveries stop to arrive, an old man sprays blood all over the sidewalk in front of his building, journalists wearing surgical masks report about riots and human misery everywhere. No one puts out the fire which devours the apartment building across the street, the power keeps cutting out until it goes out in the middle of the night and the big silence creeps in.

With such detailed descriptions of an apocalypse at the time of the plague, McBain and Vargus build suspense around their one main character who, as the world slides into its final days of civilization, becomes lonelier and lonelier. It makes me wonder what all goes on in the night, in the dark, in all of the places where my eyes can’t go. (. . .) Please help me find someone. I don’t know what to do, and I don’t want to be alone forever.

The horrific beauty of this book, unlike other zombie books, does not focus on the gory imagery of human degradation and destruction of our world. Those images coexist and function as a backdrop, while the true horror is that of a psychological nature of an unsocialized and abandoned 25 years old Derek who cannot stand the burden of loneliness in the world which completely belongs to him. Behold the loneliness. The only thing that’s left. The only thing that was ever real if you stripped away the novelties and distractions, maybe.

As the world around him crumbles further to pieces, Derek finds in himself strength to survive: But I’ve seen how things can change, how they must change, how all things must come to ash, how the old ways can die out and become something new. And I know I can change. I can transform. And so I will. And so he does transform, sometimes unaware of his actions which function on the most primal level. But he realizes and acknowledges the change that is happening not only in the world around him but within his lonely state as well. I started this letter in a lonely state, surrounded by people, literally in a building crawling with them, a city full of them, but unsure how to connect with them, how to really know any of them. And I end this letter in a lonely state, a different kind of lonely with no one around for miles. Apart from the dead bodies, I guess.

He is becoming someone else, an unknown person who not only manages to conquer his fears from both living people and the piles of dead bodies mass murdered in a government camp, but he also doesn't flinch in using a weapon to defend his survival, even finding rush and fun in killing other human beings.

McBain and Vargus have created a spectacularly creepy psychological and apocalyptic novella full of anxiety. Though from a different perspective, it brings to our mind a memory on the literary classic The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The biggest question we ask ourselves at the end of The Scattered and the Dead (Book 0.5) is who are the true winners in this story – the ones who mercifully (or not) fell victims or its survivor(s). For, living in a big wide world full of dead bodies of the disease-plagued mankind is not a prospect we should look forward to. Unless we are able to mentally transform into something we aren't, bared to our basic instinct.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



View all my reviews
Bernard Jan

The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1): Post Apocalyptic Fiction by Tim McBain

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1): Post Apocalyptic Fiction by Tim McBain and L.T. Vargus is a 634-pages-long post apocalyptic saga that warms your heart, chills your bones, makes your skin crawl and stomach churn.

Post apocalyptic might not be the totally-one-hundred-percent-and-absolutely right word, though, because the apocalypse happened, is happening and is going to happen, depending which story we read, which characters we follow, centered around the massive and ultimate doom of mankind.

What I love about McBain’s and Vargus’ writing is the poetry of transformation of the characters, events and their environment. “Action scenes” at the eve of destruction are nothing like low-rated action movies or books. Mitch, Erin, Travis, Baghead and others are not just scattered temporary survivors trying to outlive the infected teeth and stale breath of the new zombie era. Some of them touch us, some of them make us laugh, others annoy us as it should be in the real world. And that's how it is in their real world.

Although The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1) is a lengthy book, at times slow with not much going on, it keeps pulling you further and deeper into, simply demanding from a reader to cross the finish line. Except, there is no finish line.

Unavoidably, we part with some humans and humans-turned-zombies along the way into the uncertain future of the American Zombieland. However, some of them keep going, marching through the green, shabby or dead grass, driving through once crammed and then empty roads, scavenging or hiding in abandoned houses populated with occasional decaying or dried up bodies, or just leaving the nuked cities behind. Scattered but not yet dead.

Bernard Jan
www.bernardjan.com

Join my mailing list, subscribe to blog Muse!



View all my reviews
Bernard Jan

Angel's Nightmare Adventure by Angel Ramon Medina

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Those who have already read some of Angel Ramon's work (The Thousand Years War: The Trilogy and Janus: The Devil's Election) will undoubtedly expect in Angel's Nightmare Adventure short story the same amount of action and monster-mutants creatures. And they will be right. Angel invaded New York City with zombies and mutant-iguana-snake-spider-and-human-like creatures that crawled out of the Hybrid Corporation laboratories.

Angel's Nightmare Adventure is a story told from two different perspectives so it rather seems as two stories instead of one. The first part is about a teenager Angel who is getting ready for an oral operation and ends up in the hospital where he is chased by zombies and other nightmarish creatures, while the second part is about Louis, an NYPD officer who is stuck in a mansion in his search for survivors.

It is interesting to see how the author merges these two stories into one and, what I like in particular , a surprising end at the moment we think we figured it all out!

I would prefer that the author built the whole nightmare adventure on the zombies only, but monster-mutant-like creatures worked too in this laboratory induced combination of characters. This way the lovers of zombie and horror stories will both have their moments of pleasure and needed dozes of scare!

Bernard Jan
www.bernardjan.com

Join my mailing list, subscribe to blog Muse!



View all my reviews
Bernard Jan

Hounded by Ellie Douglas

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


What would you do if your beloved pet suddenly turns into a mortal enemy?! Kill him in the merciless fight of survival or give in to your emotions and serve yourself as a meal to his unquenched hunger and thirst for human flesh and blood?

Savage and brutal, Hounded by Ellie Douglas is a zombie horror novel of unique excellence! A bloody mayhem of gnawed skulls, snapped bones, torn bodies, scattered intestines and ripped extremities is described to a chilling detail. A dried stench of the walls and streets painted in human gore makes you gag on a scary drive through the streets and cities populated by someone's pets-turned-zombies.

This is the dusk of humankind, hounded by dead but very alive dogs and a virus. As we witness the gruesome destruction of one human individual after another, it's hard to feel sympathy for the whole human species. People liked dwarfism for exotic animals to have pet tigers, lions, elephants, giraffes.... But that idea came from the same laboratory as something else with a much higher price and dire consequences.

Even when the most dominate species on the planet becomes the species facing its sudden extinction, humans again showed their ugly face of robbing, scavenging, praying and killing one another. The weak beacon of hope lays in the hands of the few willing to sacrifice themselves for their beloved ones and the general good of complete strangers. Is that so different from our world? When will we learn the big lesson?

The transformation of the beloved dog Pepper into a living dead is remarkable. The end of the book is brilliant. No reason to delay purchasing and reading this gripping horror story!

BJ
www.bernardjan.com

Join my mailing list, subscribe to blog Muse!



View all my reviews
Bernard Jan

Angel's Nightmare Adventure 2: The Nightmare Continues by Angel Ramon

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


We all had in our life a dream so real we couldn't distinguish it from reality when we woke up. We also had nightmarish days for which we just wanted to end so we could wake up and breathe a sigh of relief when they were over. Except...

... they didn't end; the nightmare continued.

This happened to Angel, who in a period of five years experienced two worst nightmares. He was only 17 when he was chased by zombies and monstrous creatures through the hospital in flight to save his life and the life of a girl Maria. They both survived because it was only a nightmare and Maria became his real life girlfriend.

But what are the odds the almost similar scenario happens again, only five years later, at his first day at job as an NYPD officer? It is a beautiful September morning when he leaves his apartment in Brooklyn and drops his girlfriend Maria at Brooklyn College before he drives on to the 75th precinct in East New York to report to his first day at work.

Little did he know his first day at the 75th precinct would turn into another nightmare from hell and his first and only assignment would be saving himself and his love Maria. Because New York was once again attacked by the fast-growing nation of zombies....

If you loved the #1 Amazon Best Seller horror short story Angel's Nightmare Adventure, don't miss the second installment! Angel's Nightmare Adventure 2: The Nightmare Continues is packed with the same dose of action, fright, living dead and other hybrid creatures!

You can read my review of Angel's Nightmare Adventure here.

At the moment of publishing this review Angel is cut off from the rest of the world because of the monster hurricane Maria hitting and devastating Puerto Rico. Please support him by purchasing, reading and reviewing his books. Thank you!

BJ
www.bernardjan.com

Join my mailing list, subscribe to blog Muse!
Bernard Jan



View all my reviews

Angel Ramon Medina is the author who writes faster than I get to read his books. He is the unstoppable writing machine and in less than past three months he has published his two new books! And as I write this, he is working on his new book. Crazy man, I tell you! Crazy in a good way.

If you like aliens, grab the last sequel Life's a Beach Expansion Pack Story of his The Thousand Years War series. If you like zombies, dig into the plagued action horror Angel's Nightmare Adventure 3: Nemesis.

On a second thought why choose between any of them? Just read both books!

If you have followed this indie author from his first self-published books, you have noticed the advancement in his writing and style. With these two new books, Angel did one more step forward toward his old/new Videogame/LitRPG/GameLit genre. You may ask yourself what the heck is that? It's best we let Angel tell us in his own words.

"When you think of a GameLit book whether it’s LitRPG, LitFPS, or whichever sub-genre, you think that the story mostly takes place in a "video game" world. The term GameLit is coined as a genre that has elements of a video game and we know that video games are not "real life". In other words, most titles in the genre have no real consequences in the real world since they take place in a separate virtual world." (From his article Gamelit/LitRPG – The Real Life Connection published on greatlitrpg.com, January 23, 2018)

Video games are not for everyone (I am not too big a fan either; if I have to choose between a video game and a book, books will win by a hundred to zero percent) but that doesn't have to concern you. His books are readable and fluent also with the GameLit touch, in a way adding to them being even more interesting.

Life's a Beach Expansion Pack Story is set in Puerto Rico and its story carries on from the events of the first book of The Thousand Years War series but you can read it as a standalone. While Angel and Maria with their new mates Ben and Steven are on a vacation in Puerto Rico, the gloobas summon their forces using the virtual world and strike again in their attempt to take over the world. Reading this novel after the actual catastrophe that in 2017 hit the whole island of Puerto Rico with hurricanes Irma and Maria is a bit an awkward and bizarre experience. However, Angel Ramon Medina, who survived the wrath of both hurricanes, has every moral right to plummet his fictional island into another ice age, freezing it to change the climate on the whole planet.

If you tasted the smell of explosions, scare and unease of Resident Evil while reading the first two books of Angel's Nightmare Adventure, the third part of the series Nemesis will catapult you there. The biggest change in the last sequel is that Angel is gone (lost somewhere in Croatia) and his girlfriend Maria is left to fight zombies and many other creatures that escaped from Hybrid's underground laboratory without him. Surviving the second zombie outbreak put her capabilities of survival to another test after she finds her family murdered and the whole of New York City faces the biggest threat ever.

If you like to be scared and thrown around by unstoppable action, those are the books for you. Angel Ramon Medina offers little compassion to his heroes and villains, sacrifices are given and taken with each turn of the page.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com

Join my mailing list, subscribe to blog Muse!

Bernard Jan

Angel's Nightmare Adventure: Zero by Angel Ramon Medina

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


For the fans of video games comes another book from the seriesAngel's Nightmare Adventure! Angel Ramon blasts us to the past with the prequel Zero to Angel's Nightmare Adventure Amazon best-selling book, to the place and time where it all began. In Angel's Nightmare Adventure: Zero we are following again two parallel stories as we are led into the Clark Family Mansion in Upstate New York where the Raven Hawk Virus was first discovered.

Although GameLit is not among my favorite genres, I have to give Angel credit for keeping my attention and curiosity at full alert with a variety of human and human-made characters (zombies, dogs, snakes, web spinners, Polybius, Lizarda, flea drainers and other enemies of the human race) pacing through the stories as the battle for survival within the mansion culminates.

I won't reveal if there are any survivors of the Alpha and Bravo NYPD Special Forces team at the end of this story. The only spoiler you'll hear from me is that Angel's Nightmare Adventure doesn't end with Zero because Angel's Nightmare Adventure 1.5 is already available for pre-order!

Forgive me, I stand corrected. I have one more spoiler for you: both book covers for Angel's Nightmare Adventure: Zero and Angel's Nightmare Adventure 1.5 look darn good! They are a perfect addition to those dark horror stories!

BJ
www.bernardjan.com

Bernard Jan



View all my reviews

The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1.5): Post Apocalyptic Fiction by Tim McBain

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In the cold winter aftermath of zombie outbreak, one woman is struggling with her sanity and humanity. A few months before, one mother is putting on stake everything to rush her dying child to the hospital. There are a few other scattered and isolated individual characters, still alive, but for how long?

The Scattered and the Dead (Book 1.5): Post Apocalyptic Fiction is yet another beautifully written volume of Tim McBain's and L.T. Vargus' zombie saga which leaves you holding your breath as you slide through its snow and silence encrusted pages. It's scariest part is not what the walking dead can do to you but how solitude and loneliness can affect your mind and the ability of survival in the world that has forcefully gone to sleep.

Bj
www.bernardjan.com

Bernard Jan



View all my reviews

Angel's Nightmare Adventure 1.5 by Angel Ramon Medina

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


If you are a fan of Angel Ramon Medina and his Angel’s Nightmare Adventure series, stay calm because you won’t be disappointed with his latest installment! On the second thought, don’t stay calm because Angel is true to himself in throwing high-packed action with plenty of killing and carcasses in front of you!

In Angel’s Nightmare Adventure 1.5 he takes you all the way to the beginning of the timeline of events leading up to the series which you can now purchase also as the Ultimate Nightmare Set. Cool, right?

So, don’t delay, grab one (or all his nightmare books) and get ready to play the game! Zombies are waiting for you!

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



View all my reviews
Bernard Jan