Bookstuff

This year I've been blogging on LJ about what I've been reading, since January 1. I haven't done full book reviews for all of them because I get lazy, or sometimes the book really isn't worth it. Now I'm going to share here.

Last read was an ebook called After The Cure by Deirdre Gould, which I grabbed because it was a free zombie apocalypse book that looked readable. If they're free or very cheap, I'll often give them a go just because I need something to read on the train. A lot of the time one finds out very quickly just why it's that cheap. This one was a hell of a surprise. It was good. It was also unusual for the genre. It doesn't jump you into the apocalypse with a group of survivors banging away with superior firepower.  Seriously, I've learned a lot about weapons from this genre which is useful when playing RPGs.

This book starts off with a cure for the virus, bringing those zombies who are still intact back to being people. Severely traumatised/PTSD/mentally ill people with a high suicide rate, beginning with the first person the Cure teams tried to help. And then they find out who was responsible, a Dr Pazzo, now in the custody of the authorities and about to stand trial. The POV characters are his lawyer and a court appointed psychiatrist, who was one of those immune to the virus.

There's a community within the City, which doesn't have a name. It's the last city in the world, so possibly it doesn't need one. This community is a mix of immunes and cured, two groups who sometimes don't get on that well. Now, a legal drama with zombies grabbed me right off, but it's even better than that. Pazzo says there's another virus he developed, one for which there would be no cure.

Any more would be spoilerish, but the book is much more hopeful than the usual offering in this genre. It's a detective story starring the psychiatrist, Dr Nella Rider and the lawyer, Frank Courtlen, and also a love story crossing the lines of immune (who are supposed to only have children with one another) and cured, who aren't supposed to even go there.

On a practical side, some of the formatting was annoying, such as the intrusive titling for the chapters, which seemed to be there just to tell you what the chapter was about, i.e. The Cure. The Prison. Meeting Robert Pazzo. I would have been happy just to have the text. This was well written and no grammatical errors sprang out at me. There are some graphically described incidents, mostly involving what the Cured characters did when they were zombified, but not over the top.

There are more books in the series and I suspect these aren't free, but that's okay.  I think it was clever of the author to provide the first book for free, to hook people in, because in my case it's going to work.  If I manage to get things published online, I think I'll probably try that also.

Bookstuff

My last read was an ebook called After The Cure by Deirdre Gould, which I grabbed because it was a free zombie apocalypse book that looked readable. If they're free or very cheap, I'll often give them a go just because I need something to read on the train. A lot of the time one finds out very quickly just why it's that cheap. This one was a hell of a surprise. It was good. It was also unusual for the genre. It doesn't jump you into the apoc with a group of survivors banging away with superior firepower.

This book starts off with a cure for the virus, bringing those zombies who are still intact back to being people. Severely traumatised/PTSD/mentally ill people with a high suicide rate, beginning with the first person the Cure teams tried to help. And then they find out who was responsible, a Dr Pazzo, now in the custody of the authorities and about to stand trial. The POV characters are his lawyer and a court appointed psychiatrist, who was one of those immune to the virus.

There's a community within the City, which doesn't have a name. It's the last city in the world, so possibly it doesn't need one. This community is a mix of immunes and cured, two groups who sometimes don't get on that well. Now, a legal drama with zombies grabbed me right off, but it's even better than that. Pazzo says there's another virus he developed, one for which there would be no cure.

Any more would be spoilerish, but the book is much more hopeful than the usual offering in this genre. It's a detective story starring the psychiatrist, Dr Nella Rider and the lawyer, Frank Courtlen, and also a love story crossing the lines of immune (who are supposed to only have children with one another) and cured, who aren't supposed to even go there.

On a practical side, some of the formatting was annoying, such as the intrusive titling for the chapters, which seemed to be there just to tell you what the chapter was about, i.e. The Cure. The Prison. Meeting Robert Pazzo. I would have been happy just to have the text. This was well written and no grammatical errors sprang out at me. There are some graphically described incidents, mostly involving what the Cured characters did when they were zombified, but not over the top.

There are more books in the series and I suspect these aren't free, but that's okay. I think it was clever of the author to provide the first book for free, to hook people in, because in my case it's going to work. If I manage to get things published online, I think I'll probably try that also.