Thursday, July 12, 2012

Review: This Dark Earth

*This is a sponsored review. All opinions are 100% mine. 


There is a viral outbreak across the United States causing people to literally eat their selves, followed by uncontrollable seizures; spasms, and Tourette’s. Your heart will race like crazy until it finally explodes, but your body won’t die as you’ll become one of the undead or more commonly known as a zombie. 

The infected are sent to White Hall, where doctors and nurses attend to the victims. Eventually, they turn into zombies and chaos occurs, but not just inside White Hall. Planes drop nuclear bombs upon the United States. Is this our own government or an enemy country? They may never know exactly how it happens, but for one doctor, Lucy, all she cares about is finding her family. With the help of Knock-Out, a non-violent man, Lucy makes it to her home where she finds that her husband has turned. She finds her ten-year-old son, Gus, has survived.

It’s not safe staying at Lucy's home, so they leave, mostly on foot due to the nuclear bomb knocked out most electrical devices. They come upon a small band of military men, whose crooked leaders has just fallen. There’s no hope for survival or a future, until the young Gus comes up with the idea to build their own city, or more like a fortress around a bridge in Arkansas.

Years go by and their group has increased in numbers. They have built a wall around the bridge, and they plan on extending it. Gus is now a young man, but the years have not been good to him as he has lost his arm in battle and his face is disfigured. He knows that the ‘slavers’, horrible men who capture and torture women, treating them as dogs, are coming for them. But there is even a worse threat coming for them - thousands of zombies.

I felt that This Dark Earth was heavily influenced by the 1978 classic “Dawn of the Dead”, where four survivors take refuge in a shopping mall. In the movie, they hot-wire cars and clean-out the parking lot that was full of zombies, well it was more like blocking them off. Then, they built a wall hiding the access to the stairs, providing them with safety. Eventually, they must deal with a band of bikers and a horde of the undead. “This Dark Earth” involves a band of survivors that build their own fortress around a bridge, but eventually they must battle the ‘slavers” and a horde of shamblers, aka zombies.

This Dark Earth is not really about the walking dead, but is more about the human condition after a nuclear apocalypse. There are horrible men who enslave the women for their own desires, and then there are good people who want to continue with a moral society. The chapters are too long, being between fifty to seventy pages long. The author could have easily had several ‘parts’ that contained several chapters in each. The narration changes in each chapter, either in first or third person, and switches the point-of-view from character to character, which can become annoying at times. I felt like I was reading two books shoved into one novel. The first half with Lucy, Gus, and Knock-Out trying to survive should have been expanded to one book, where as the bridge fortress half could have been the sequel.

 I have seen dozens of zombie movies and I have read a few zombie books over the years. Does “This Dark Earth” stand out? Yes and no. The overall flow and the way the narration is written are wonderfully done, but I never felt for any of the characters as they all are two-dimensional. At first I liked the strong-headed Lucy, but then she got shoved into the background and by the time I finished reading the book I had forgot about her. I never felt that Gus was a true hero as I thought he was a little weak to me. I like the idea of building a fortress around a bridge, that way the survivors can fight off the zombies easier.  The climax is action-packed, and somewhat leaves it open for a sequel.

This Dark Earth follows the typical zombie formula with a few clichés here and there. The clever writing helps the story move along, despite some bland characters. Zombie fans will like reading This Dark Earth as well as some horror lovers.





About the Author:

John Hornor Jacobs was nominated for the Bram Stroker Award for his debut novel, Southern Girls, which The Onion AV Club called "sumptuous" and proclaimed "beautifully probes the eerie, horror-invested underbelly of the South." Having worked in advertising for the past fifteen years, John is also an artist, a musician, and the cofounder of Needle: A Magazine of Noir. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas. Follow him on Twitter at @johnhornor, and read his lively ramblings-and checkout an interactive map of Bridge City-at www.JohnHornorJacobs.com

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