Breathers

[The Vault Dweller]

Just picked up this short little affair at the library.

For a self proclaimed zombie comedy romance I actually found it decent but frustrating at times.

http://www.amazon.com/Breathers-Zombies ... roduct_top

Spoilers

So yeah I start off actually caring about Andy and the other undead. The sheer amount of shit that happens to them is insane. Unfortunately I can believe that much of the harassment that occurs in the novel would occur in similar circumstances. I actually felt engrossed in the characters and deeply angered at the abuse hurled at them.

But towards the end my compassion turns to disgust if not outright hatred. I mean yeah I get that human flesh offers them some method of regaining a form of life but the way they go about it and sheer careless cruelty and brutality about it just pissed me off. I mean the murder of Andy's parents more or less was justified since they were ya know going to well essentially sell their son to a zoo because he had a few pricey bottles of wine. But the later murders just comes off as more or less well evil. The characters who have been put on a pedestal decide to spontaneously jump off and start munching on random people.

What particularly disgusted me was the scene at the frat house. While the Frat Boys do more or less act like complete and total monsters the sheer brutality of the slaughter of often enough completely uninvolved individuals including non Frat members is appalling. Besides this it seems to me that the authors personal views mixed into this scene. A massacre originally motivated by the desire for revenge seems to turn into a massacre motivated by some twisted moralistic anger at drugs and sex.

Just my two bits. So anyone else read this one?

[silversnake]

A bit of a thread necro as I'm almost done reading this on my Kindle thanks to my wife picking it up, being the voracious reader that she is.

I'm not completely to the end yet, but I'm enjoying it as an interesting take on "what if zombies weren't unthinking shamblers but just people that didn't die all the way?" There's some pretty blatant social commentary throughout about real-life civil rights struggles (racial, sexual orientation, etc.) that could lead a freshman English literature class to spend weeks dissecting all the "messages" in it, but it doesn't detract from the plot. Overall, I'd say it's a light read and entertaining.

To the comments by the poster above, I haven't found the violence thus far to cause me to care less about the characters as I see it as a bit of a side-effect of eating breather - more aggressive and more risk-taking. Of course, I haven't gotten to the end yet so it could turn highly moralistic or over-the-top graphic and turn me off, but so far none of the zombie-committed violence is any worse than the violence committed against them by society - subjecting conscious thinking beings to the horrors of the "zoos" and laboratory experiments.