http://enduringromance.blogspot.com/2009/11/xombies-apocalypse-blues-by-walter.html
-and which made my Top Ten for 2009.
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If you're a young person or you got emotionally attached to certain characters in the first book, you might have a hard time getting through the first part. Stick it out. Besides having your favorites to look forward to, the opening action is a great show-don't-tell of what happened in the first novel.
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To re-cap, in the first novel, seventeen year old Lulu, is hiding out in a beach house with her nutcase-mother when Agent X breaks out and turns all menstruating women into lunatics. Yeah, I know that sounds a lot like real life, especially if you ask my husband, but these chicks are also blue. And I ain't. Anyway, Agent X turns women into insane blue zombie-like creatures who hunt down men (I can hear the cat-calls now) and attack them with the Love-Bite From Hell, which turns them into freakin' lunatics too. Fun, huh?
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You don't really need to know all that when you start this novel. It does stand alone, but it's nice to have the first book read, especially if you're a character-driven reader like me.
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A bunch of military types converted a nuclear submarine into a Noah's Arc, except for one thing - no fertile women to make babies with. Darn. There is a female scientist, Alice Langhorne, on board. And poor ol' Lulu, who has a medical condition which prevents her from maturing, got infected anyway, but it's effecting her differently. Through Lulu, Langhorne has figured out some bio-chemical mumbo-jumbo to use her blood to sort of innoculate some other xombies to the point that they have higher brain function and will do what she says. Poor Lulu just lays there like a wasted lab rat.
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Also from the first novel is hero, Sal DeLuca. He had the gumption to wear a squarril suit for a good cause and was confident enough to rescue Lulu while wearing it. Now, he's stuck down in the hold with the other teenage sons of the military-genius type guys who thought they had it all figured out.
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So, while Alice and cronies organize thir Xombie-Bots for a special mission to fetch some stuff they need to beat Agent X, the new captain decides it's time to lose some dead weight.
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Yeah, the glorious new leader has decided that the teenage boys who've been whining, bullying, and just taking up space and not helping out need to be gotten rid of. Everyone's hungry, provisions are low, and the hard workers are sick of feeding the lazy-butts.
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This is unfortunately accurate to real life. Old men see younger men as competition for food and fertile females and try to get rid of them, thus ensuring their own destruction.
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Remember this and never forget.
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No Babies, No Future.
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Of course, not all older men are this selfish and stupid.
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Just like not all young men are whining little slackers.
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Sal's not one of these guys, but he wants to go on the suicide mission anyway. The adult who sends them was ordered to do it. He's not a selfish and stupid old fart, but he's likely to get tossed overboard if he doesn't obey. He lets Sal go, hoping he can keep the other boys alive.
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And so the boys are sent to find food.
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And Alice sends out her Xombie-Bots and is horrified to discover, after the fact, that Lulu has wakened from her wasted-labrat state and gone with them, horrified because Lulu's unique physiology is so vital. Turns out this is a good thing, because she's the most cognizant of them. Alice is able to communicate with her through a mobile video device attached to the Xombies.
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At this point I was thinking, "Okay, these kids are gonna go out and if they don't get xomibified, they're gonna figure out what they're really made off and come back to that rickety old barge and kick some butt." Don't take that as review, because, you know, I come up with these expectations on my own.
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Anyway, as expected the whinier of the slackers get picked off easily, either because they won't listen to Sal or because they're too busy fighting amongst themselves. The hardier the longer they survive, but they do get picked off as they venture out. They do find food, but so do the xombies. And then there's running and screaming, like you'd find in any good Speilberg movie. And then Sal finds a bike shop.
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Meanwhile, Lulu's found a super-duper top secret laboratory lair, and more evidence that the whole Agent X thing might not have been such an accident. If the shadowy baddies didn't do it deliberately, maybe they did know in advance. But, Lulu's too xombified to really make sense of it all.
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And then things start blowing up.
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Midst all that Sal's figured out his group may be converging on Lulu's group and the boys all wonder if that might be a good thing, because, after all, Lulu's xombies are controlled. Right?
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Don't you just love a good shoot 'em up, run shrieking into the night kind of story?
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Well, I do.
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And goshdarnit, Sal had better get his act together if he's gonna ensure survival of the species with Lulu, that's all I got to say.
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Pop over to the author's website and learn more about this novel which is due out this month, I do believe.
http://www.waltergreatshell.com/
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