An Amazon reviewer writes:
Quote:
The author pretends to not be the author at all, and poses as the translator and editor of a Latin document that turns up in a German library. The "real" author, Brookside claims, is Lucius Artorius Castus, otherwise known to history as "maybe kinda sorta this guy was the real King Arthur". This is explained in a drily amusing introduction that is played perfectly straight. I liked how the "voice" in the introduction was pretty distinct from the "voice" of the fake ancient document. If you read a lot of history, there's a cadence to documents from antiquity that is pretty effectively employed here. It breaks down in some sections, mainly the ones where the story just requires more dialogue than an ancient text would include, but the overall "spell" works. Since the book is formatted as if it were nonfiction, there are a lot of footnotes in the "editor voice" that add to the historical feeling of the work. A lot of the footnotes seem to be in-jokes about differing interpretations of the history of the period - I got some of them, but don't think I got them all.
Then, of course, there's the zombie story itself to consider, leaving all of the meta stuff aside. And it's a good one. A lot of zombie fiction set in the modern era is repetitive and derivative. But since this story is set in antiquity, everything is different - from how the zombie infestation starts, to how ancient religion and superstition makes the characters react to it, to how zombies have to be fought and killed without guns, etc. It's worth reading just to read the scenes where pagans and Christians scoff at each other's plans for how to deal with the zombies. And the story is set in an obscure part of Roman Gaul where it seems that civilization lies very tenuously on the land, and the atmosphere of darkness and isolation this creates works really well for a story of this kind.
|