Jennifer's Books

This is a short prequel story to Blackmore's Mountain Man series. I downloaded both the kindle version and the audible audio versions free via amazon. This review focuses more on the audible version, though I did use the Immersion Reading feature which combines both the ebook and audio versions.

 

Now, if you've followed me for any length of time, you'd know that I'd been having a hard time finding good (free) zombie fiction on kindle. The tide, fortunately, seems to be turning for me. I'm cautiously optimistic after starting the Green Fields series and now this one.

 

Back to this book, though. Augustus Berry, survivor of the zombie apocalypse, leaves his mountain hideaway to forage for supplies in a nearby hospital. Things go horribly, horribly wrong. That's all the synopsis you'll get from me for fear of spoiling.

 

I liked the fact that Augustus (or Gus) is just a normal guy. A guy who's survived as long as he has by learning from the new reality he's living in, yet doesn't come off as an unkillable superman. He drops f-bombs like crazy, he gets scared, he makes (most of the time) smart, well thought out decisions to keep himself safe, instead of charging into places half-cocked to advance the plot.

 

The book is plenty gory, plenty scary, yet also features humor. Gus' joy over finding a cache of toilet paper had me laughing out loud. The whole thing really worked for me in a short story. Whether it still does in a full length novel remains to be seen.

 

The audiobook version contains this short story, which clocks in at an hour or so, and also the first two chapters of the first full book in the series, Mountain Man. R.C. Bray is the narrator, and I absolutely adored him while listening to The Martian, so I was thrilled when I found out he narrated this story. He does a fantastic job, and while he only has two voices to perform in this one, well...let me just say that the voice he did for one character thoroughly creeped me out.

 

I will likely give the first book a go sometime in the near future.