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Ok. So I've postponed finishing The Killing Floor. Just a tad too slow building up with too many characters with too many agendas; it just dilutes the story.
Picked up and read Jack Hamlyn's Necrophobia 1 and 2.
"An ordinary summer's day. The grass is green, the flowers are blooming. All is right with the world. Then the dead start rising. From cemetery and mortuary, funeral home and morgue, they flood into the streets until every town and city is infested with walking corpses, blank-eyed eating machines that exist to take down the living. The world is a graveyard. And when you have a family to protect, it's more than survival. It's war."
"Necrophobia Book 2 Nightmare, New York. From Manhattan to the Bronx, Queens to Brooklyn, a hellzone of the walking dead, crazed survivalists, and deranged cults. One man will stand against them. One man will fight them street to street. He'll do anything to find his friends and his son. There's no pit he won't crawl through. No enemy he will not face. And God help anyone who gets in his way."
Very gory and action-oriented tale. Hamlyn either has military experience or has done his homework on military equipment as his descriptions of weapons and their effects seem accurate. Story-wise, our protagonist, Steve Niles, fights to protect his son and wife with the help of his sister-in-law and next door neighbor and find some where safe to hold up. They succeed in making it to a compound set up by a prescient Vietnam vet who Steve had befriended. They seem safe until they draw the destructive notice of both a rogue U.S. military unit and a lawless militia group. Forced from their compound and on the run, Steve is separated from the group and is drafted into one of the rogue military. Now he must not only survive the zombies, but also the insane leaders of his unit and try to escape to rejoin his family.
Necrophobia is VERY gory - well beyond the typical blood and guts of the genre. The action is well developed, and mostly believable (except for Steve's almost preternatural luck). Don't grow attached to any of the characters you meet for Hamlyn is likely to kill them off in the most violent way. My only real complaint is that many of the scenes seem to be written for their own sake; meaning that they don't advance the protagonist's main objective. Indeed, up through the second half of book 2, there really isn't a "life or death" (aside from the zombies of course) issue driving Niles. This changes once he is separated from his family, however I wonder what will happen when (if) he finds them. As one of my "how to write" books stated, are things just happening to your hero, or is your story telling how your hero reacts to the events in chasing his objective?
Till next time I just want to leave you with....HEY LOOK, a brain....
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