Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36456 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-15
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 184 pages

Synopsis
A bizarre plague of the walking dead. A nation desperate for survival. It could be the end of the world. Around the globe, the dead are rising to devour the living. Hospitals are overrun, and martial law has been declared. The streets are in chaos. Society is disintegrating. George Zaragosa is a young school teacher living in the shadow of his fiancee's unsolved murder. Now he just wants to go home to his family. He's made the journey before, traveling from Austin to San Uvalde. It's usually a short drive. But he knows this time it's going to be different. Along the way, George must negotiate military roadblocks, FEMA camps, and street thugs, not to mention hordes of the living dead. He is determined to make it home, but only one thing is certain: his trip down the road will be a journey like no other.

Customer Reviews

A promising start
Ibarra is not a professional writer, just a man that enjoys writing stories and is fulfilling a dream of being published. For all his efforts the book culd have been also worse. On the other hand it could have been better and is far from the best in the genre.

George returning to the school where he teaches to fetch a gift from his late girlfirend was a nice human touch (to me at least), irrational and placing him in some mortal danger. In times of great stress and strife, we are not the most rational of beings, proven time and again throughout this book and others in the genre.

While short on substance in places, I did feel for some of the characters and somethings wondered if we really needed to know every last detail of them being eaten alive. Some of the detailing is very gratuitous and while I am a gore fan, I thought some went a little overboard.

The FEMA camps and initial reactions to the plague did have me reminiscing over other disasters that have happened in the USA (and some of these are also mentioned!), so it makes me wonder how many of Ibarra's on personal views made it into the book, seeing how he's placed as much of his own personal experiences into it.

The flashback of Georges' girlfriends death wasn't needed, but it did add about 8 ages to the books length. The reason I thought it's not needed though is because it gives away to much. The mystery should have been kept there so some parts of the book are not ruined by the early spoiler.

A promising first book and I look forward oto reading the second in the series with hopes of seeing further books from him in the future.

Please dont buy this!!
This is a VERY simplistic, shallow attempt at a book. It centres around a character with the same attributes as the book itself whose name is George. You are not likely to forget this as the author uses his name a MILLION times. George this, George that... It is actually quite unbelievable that no other review mentions this and that whoever proof read this didnt alter it.
I couldnt get to the end of this book.
Dont waste your money.

Says nothing, and with bad grammar!
As a fan of the zombie genre the generally positive reviews for this book made me decide to try it. Mr. Ibarra is evidentally not a professional writer, so kudos to him for having the determination to get himself published. However, his book is very poorly written (grammar is especially bad), his characters shallow, and his setpieces and encounters, written one suspects to satisfy gorehounds alone, fail to ring true. Even in a book of a fantasy nature, the suspension of disbelief is vital. Here, the many flaws kept yanking me back into the real world to question the whats and whys of the plot.

No amount of pop-culture references (and there are plenty) or blunt swipes at the establishment (Romero and Max Brooks both do it far better and with much more intelligence and research) can fool the audience into thinking that what is effectively pulp slash fiction has any sort of gravitas or message. Ibarra fails on this count, try as he might to follow in the footsteps of those who have made the zombie genre a successful allegory for all manner of contemporary issues and therefore so appealing to a fanbase beyond those who just like to see dead people bite chunks out of folk.

This failure aside, the author could probably have got by with a simple horror tale if his plot and pace weren't so clunky. Three examples from early on spring to mind. The main protagonist, George, who Ibarra goes to great lengths to explain was a mild-mannered and sentimental school teacher just the day before, coldbloodedly murders a policeman for issuing parking tickets by running him down, and then gleefully describes the physical process of what happens to the poor copper's body as it goes beneath the car (he evidentally likes the effect, as he later runs over a zombie in similar detail). The teacher's lack of remorse is explained away glibly with a throwaway line about how, in a zombie apocalypse, sentiment is a killer. A potential source of great insight is swept to one side so our George has a carte-blanche for quilt-free goremaking. The repeated heavy-handed emphasis that all uniformed people are corrupt, bad and not to be trusted makes one wonder if Mr. Ibarra has a history with authority! Maybe this is the first zombie novel to be written in revenge for parking tickets?

Even less credible is how George is drawn to the school at which he worked to retrieve a sentimental item from his late girlfriend. Fair enough, but to explain why he puts himself in such danger, Ibarra concocts an unintentionally hilarious flashback that lasts a whole chapter as she is forced to consume cocaine by a borderline racist caricature of a Hispanic sadist, overpowers two cops on his payroll, and dies of a gunshot wondering what her wedding would have been like. Brilliant, especially when he ends the sequence with a line noting that it was all covered up and that George would never have any idea that any of it happened! So why put it in then??? It has nothing to do with anything else in the book, and feels like an amateur stab at writing Scarface 2.

Shortly afterwards, George meets and rescues another teacher, a female one, from zombies - very decomposed, maggot infested ones (despite the crisis only being a few days old). After both cave in heads and then vomit profusely, Ibarra decides to tell us that George notices she is wearing girly clothes, and both do the beast with two backs amongst the rotting corpses that had just made them both puke in a love scene that is as sudden and unbelievable as it is unerotic and funny.

As the book continues it unfolds like a 15-year old's stab at an English exam ("Question 1 - write a zombie novel"), with each scenario evidentally having been written on the fly without a plan or structure as they appear to have popped into the author's mind and he has deemed them cool enough to add.

A shame, as at the core there are some decent ideas, albeit all built on the back of others who have set the lore of the genre. There is certainly nothing new here. Ultimately the book is aimed squarely at zombie fans (Ibarra rarely describes the creatures, as he evidentally assumes you must know in your mind what a zombie already looks like). Max Brooks' World War Z and Kirkman/Adlard's The Walking Dead remain the best examples of intelligent and compelling zombie literature. I would recommend them instead.