| Date: 23 May 2011, 17:47
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In a world filled with formulaic zombie novels, Walter Greatshell's XOMBIES trilogy stands over the pack, taking 'running zombies' (technically, people infected with a contagious nanomaterial created as part of an immortality experiment) to places Danny Boyle never dreamed of. The first book, XOMBIES, started out as a running-zombie story with a very sympathetic, frail but clever protagonist. In the sequel APOCALYPTICON he showed us the Xombie outbreak from the POV of a different character, giving the Xombies a powerup in the process, and in the final book in the trilogy, APOCALYPSO, all hell breaks loose.
This is a very crazy, action-packed postapocalyptic horror/sci-fi... comedy? In an online inteview, Greatshell has said he thinks of his books primarily as satire, and his sense of humor comes to the forefront in this installment. A quote from Steve Martin at the beginning of the book -- "Comedy is not pretty" -- is good preparation for what follows. While Greatshell's Xombies are nothing at all like the stereotypical, boring The Walking Dead/Dawn of the Dead zombie flesh-eaters, he does follow George Romero in one very significant way: despite the monstrously strong Xombies, the book is largely about human-on-human conflict, with a heavy dose of left-wing political satire at various targets. (One amusing note: Obama is president during the Xombies outbreak, judging from the hilarious moment in Washington, DC on page 201.) While there's many seriously creepy scenes of people running and fighting for their lives against dreadful odds, this isn't a mere lesson in resource management like the typical siege-fight-run zombie novel... neither is it exactly a J.G. Ballard-esque "embrace the apocalypse" dreamscape... it's more of a conjurer's deck of chaos, fast reversals, comedy, and Xombies getting shredded into twitching blue meat. On that note, my one regret about APOCALYPSO is that it's not 100 pages longer; there's so much happening so fast, I lost track of some plot threads, and a few more pseudo-scientific explanations would have been nice. But like his Xombies, Greatshell just keeps running, with infectious eagerness, throwing out new surprises right up to the end.
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