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Review of "Living With the Dead - With Spring Comes the Fall"
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Mod
Heh. Amy, you can go to his blog and check it out for free. Start at the very beginning. Honest, once you start reading, it's hard to stop. Like I said, I was up until 2AM to finish it. He owes me a good night's sleep. ;)
Mod
Saying that this review is great would be an understatement. I'm not much of a zombie fan either, I stick to the typical vamps and wolves, however, reading your review had convinced me to pick up a random zombie book and have high hopes for it! Crazy!
Quote 'I was afraid to watch the news -- because the situation seemed just that real. '
That is really what I wanted out of a book, the feeling of it being real.
I know you'll love it, Amy. I read it at night, and let's just say I didn't dare look out my windows when it was dark for a long, long time :)Thanks so much, Natshane :) If you're looking for real, it's here. *shudder*
Enjoy, ladies, and let me know what you think.
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The worst scenario in a zombie apocalypse: a.zombie's incessantly pounding at every entrance trying to eat your vital organs b.unending fear of your inevitable death or c.having to slice into the brain of the walking undead? Your answer would be wrong. Don't answer that question. Although all of those fears are truly horrific, nothing could be worse than having to fight, maim and kill your fellow human survivors for the right to live.
Josh is a die hard (sorry pun intended) zombie fanatic. He has read all the survival guides and watched every zombie movie made. When the epidemic started in Cincinnati, he was one of the only ones who saw it for what it was. Hell on here had arrived. For many people it ended quickly. For others, the term quickly was no longer applicable to them; they had been transformed into mindless zombies. Josh and his wife Jess had fortified their home and laid in wait for what they new was coming.
Scavenging, farming, killing, and back breaking labor is all josh and the collection of apocalypse survivors had to look forward to. When they thought they had moved forward at all, they ran into murderers, thieves, rapists, and cannibals. Then came the smarties, and we are not talking about a group of tasty treats....
This book wasn't all I was hoping for. I had read some great reviews and it came highly recommended, but parts of this book just stretched on and on. I loved the blog style writing to the book, and I know that the author tried to make it as authentic as possible, but I really think the repeating of certain things was, by definition, redundant. It made it hard in spots to continue to read.
The parts of the book that made me want to keep reading were often times glossed over because the blogger, Josh, was too worked up, stressed out, or distraught by the happenings. Zombies existed in this book that is titled "Living with the Dead", but the book itself really glosses over the zombie parts quite a bit until you learn of what becomes of these zombies. It captures your attention at the end, but for some, they may not have made it that far. So practice your patience, get out your zombie survival guide and prepare for the apocalypse...
http://journalstone.com/2011/04/06/li...
Mod
This is a good review, Amy. Very well-thought out and honest. For me, I really like the parts that deal with the every-day life. It just makes it more real for me. I imagine what it must be like to be one of the survivors able to follow Josh's blog, or even finding this as a journal some ten years later. *shiver* If there IS a ten years later. ;)I hope you're not sorry you read it. I stand by my recommendation. :)
Mod
For anyone who reads our reviews on this book!!! There is a second book out there!! :-)
It would be great to see how Josh's world turns out years (30 or more) after the end of the apocalypse. If for no other reason than to see how my favorite people are doing, how the kids grew up and to see what, if any, societies grew and thrived from the disaster.
Hey Amy, what's up!? What book are you guys talking about?
Mod
Alright... I don't usually read this stuff because I don't like to feed my imagination with too much 'scary'--but you guys have almost convinced me to try it out. If I have nightmares or run up my electricity bill because I have to turn ALL the lights on at night, I'm hunting you down! ;-)
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Already got it on my Kindle ;-)... Sooo...if I'm traumatized, I'll expect $3 too! LOL
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Alright, $2 from her and $1 from you?? ;-)
Part of the reason I'm such a book snob is because I don't have a whole lot of time, and although I'm a really fast reader, I have a lot of stuffs to do. When a book isn't worth it, it really irritates me. To be frank, it pisses me off. Not to mention the economic impact, which further stokes the Irritation Fires. If I'm not happy with the story, and I don't think I've spent my time or my money well, I'm really annoyed.
A good friend recommended this to me, but I resisted reading it because I wasn't sure I was going to like it. She told me it was a "zombie" book, and although I enjoyed "World War Z" by Max Brooks and I'm totally hooked by "The Walking Dead" on AMC, I'm not really a zombie reader. Plus, it's written in a blog format, and I have found that can be a boring way to read a book.
I was more than pleasantly surprised by Joshua Guess's book. From the very first "entry", I was HOOKED. Once I started, I couldn't wait to read the next one, and the next one, and so on until it was 2am and I finished the entire thing in one sitting. It. Is. Fab.
The story starts off as an ordinary Kentucky geek is watching the news and noticing reports of a disturbance in Ohio. Right away he sees the seeds of a Zombie Apocalypse, and springs into action. He starts right away preparing for the worst, trying to warn his family and friends, laying in supplies and shoring up his defenses. He blogs every day, documenting exactly what he's doing and the important preparations he's making -- but more than that, Josh documents how he's feeling and the emotional, physical and spiritual toll the entire experience is taking on him and everyone around him.
Most zombie fiction I've read (and I admit, it's not a lot) seem to focus on the brain-eating, rotting horror that are zombies and the military or defensive actions that the characters are taking. "Living With the Dead" is unique to me in that it involves the lives and the emotions of not only dealing with the undead intent on eating the living, but with the complicated and difficult decisions the remaining survivors have to make in the wake of destruction of society as they have always known it.
Since the blog is, and continues to be, updated in "real time", you can follow the day-to-day changes in the characters and sympathize with what they're up against. You question whether or not you could make these decisions yourself, how you would deal with the apocalypse, what you would do in their stead.
You won't agree with everything that's done. You won't like everything that happens. You won't like all the people you meet -- you may not even like the narrator. But that's what makes all of this seem so terrifyingly real. When I finished the last page of the first six months (you can either follow along in "real time" on the blog or purchase the entire compilation on Amazon)
I was afraid to watch the news -- because the situation seemed just that real.
(On a side note, there's some really great information on what to do to prepare for a Zombie Apocalypse. I took notes, you know, just in case.)
Another thing I've noticed about zombies is although the basic precepts stay the same (they die, they reanimate, can only be killed forever through some kind of brain trauma, they eat the living, they never...ever...stop) different writers add a little something different to their zombies. Guess has added some horrifying and frightening aspects to his zombies that really freaked me, and yet still made sense in his zombie-world. The suspension of disbelief is easy because Guess's world is logical even in the midst of madness.
The price is right, and the story is worth every penny and then some. This ranks up there as one of my top reads for 2011.
Joshua Guess