Product Description

Film rights to "Monster Island", the first book in David Wellington's zombie trilogy, have been optioned to Stephen Susco, who will adapt and produce. Stephen Susco has written and sold over two dozen scripts and pitches to New Line Cinema, Warner Brothers, Dimension, Miramax, Universal, Sony, United Artists, Lionsgate and Paramount Studios, and has had the privilege of writing for a variety of acclaimed directors (including Mike Nichols, Taylor Hackford, Ted Demme and Philip Noyce) and Oscar-winning producers (including Kathleen Kennedy, Lawrence Bender, Quentin Tarantino and Gale Anne Hurd). His first produced film, "The Grudge", grossed over $100 million domestically, and nearly $300 million worldwide and on video.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #94821 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback

Review
"Glorious and grisly." --Rue Morgue "Excellent... It's got all the stuff a zombie aficionado wants." -- BoingBoing.net "An instant horror classic." --Paul Goat Allen, BN.com I've admired Wellington's short stories in such collections as THE UNDEAD and BRAINCHILD, but standing out on his own, he proves himself the real deal. Horror fans - and even non-horror fans who can't resist cat-and-mouse adventure - will be marooned happily on this ISLAND. - Rod Lott, Bookgasm

About the Author
David Wellington is an author of zombie fiction and a zombie aficionado. MONSTER NATION is part of the Zombie series which he began on his website (he has retained electronic rights to the series), along with MONSTER ISLAND and MONSTER PLANET. He has also written zombie fiction specifically designed to be downloaded onto IPod's. He went on to Syracuse University and then Penn State, where he received an MFA in Creative Writing. He currently lives in Denver.

Customer Reviews

The Goodish, The Baddish, And The Downright Dead Ugly-ish !
Monster Planet is the third book in the `Monster' trilogy by David Wellington, `Island' and `Nation' being the first two novels respectively in the series. But before I give my opinion of the third `Monster' book, I would ask the reader of this review to read the cast of characters in the book. It may help you to understand as to why I have come to my own judgement of this novel.

The Cast :

The Goodish :
Ptolemy and band of S.A.S. Mummies, a cannibalistic magician with a living tree-stump for an arm and his merry band of half eaten, gravy covered zombies, Marisol - voodoo instigator of her own gang of the gardening dead, Sarah - daughter of Dekalb with ability to communicate and feel the un-dead, Dekalb - Zombie father of Sarah with powers to rejuvenate injury to others and the living.

The Baddish :
The Tsarevich - deformed zombie/vampire leader of the army of the dead, with powers to project his own image and integrate the living with the shambling un-dead, Nilla - the amazing invisible zombie woman, a talking brain in jar, Erasmus - extremely hairy werewolf/ guerrilla type zombie, Enni Langstrom - zombie with powers to speed up the un-dead, along with his band mutilated zombies with bone blades for arms, Cicatrix - human masochist, Aayan - cat-woman style leather clad zombie that can shoot melting power-blasts from her hands, Amanita - the zombie mushroom lady, normal zombies, big zombies, the co-operating living and the ghost of Mael.

The Downright Dead Ugly-ish .
Gary -the ever lasting zombie skull with the crab-like legs of a crustacean.

It is now twelve years after the un-dead pretty much inherited the entire planet, with only small groups of people banding together to try to survive the zombie apocalypse in the deserts and irradiated cities of the world. Sarah, daughter of Dekalb (hero of Monster Island), has now reached maturity and fights alongside Aayan and the Somali women's army in Egypt. After Aayan is taken prisoner by the combined forces of living and un-dead army of the Tasrevich, Sarah sets out on her global conquest to either save her friend or put a bullet in her head to lay her peacefully to rest.

I have a problem with Wellington's writing in so far as even though he tells a good story, the book reads smoothly and on the whole is enjoyable non-sense, he tends to come up with ideas that seem to get added to the novel and go no-where or fail to get fully rounded off before he starts off on a completely different tangent, and your left thinking `Well, what was that all about ?' The introduction of a `wooden armed magician' being a prime example of what I mean.

In the second novel Wellington introduces us to Vronski and his ailing, cancerous wife Charlotte, who actually seems to be the man responsible for the creation of the Source, yet the main villain of all three novels seems to be Mael Mag Och, who has absolutely no connection to anything relating to the Source but seems to fully understand how to use it.

I got the feeling that when writing `Planet' the author must have been indulging in some private passion of reading his collection of X-Men and Fantastic Four comics. "I need a new character - OK, FF invisible woman, or Beast and Jean-Grey from the X-Men."

I was hoping that Wellington would take the opportunity in the third book to finally round off the series, tying up all the loose ends and the giving the reader a satisfactory - if not necessarily happy - ending. In this I was disappointed and thought the ending was a bit of a damp squid. I cannot say that other readers of this book will have the same feelings as myself, but I felt that after three books, and approximately 1200 pages of fiction, the author could have put a rubber stamp on the finale of the series of `Monster' novels .The only possible conclusion I can draw from Wellington's disappointing ending of this book, is that with the `Source' still being open - and Mael constantly drawing un-dead bodies to him in an attempt to free himself and continue his end of world scenario - that it wont be long before Aliens arrive in flying saucers in the fourth book 'Monster Universe' or 'Monster Milk-Way' !!

This third book really also doesn't have in it what I feel zombie fiction fans - those looking for gut ripping, intestine eating, blood dripping terror - will have come to expect from other recent zombie writing like Keene's excellent `The Rising' and `City Of The Dead' or Matthew Smith's `Words Of Their Roaring'. Maybe this is more of a thinking man's zombie novel and I have more of an un-dead brain between my own ears. At times I felt it more of a fantasy novel than a horror - and if our hero sometime during the book had uttered `Crom' I would not have been surprised !

A bit disappionted
After enjoying the first two books i must admit i found this one a little disappionting. It seemed like the writer was on autopilot and running short on ideas and was getting a bit too strange. It was definatley not a page turner like the previous two which was a shame. No doubt many fans of this series will still enjoy it and i may be in the miniority but i have to still state my reservations.

It's all downhill from here
I found the first two books in this series completely average in every way, but once I start something I see it through to the end. I wish I hadn't with this. At one point I stopped and had to question why on earth I was reading a book that had suck ridiculous aspects like mummies with shotguns and a werewolf zombie with a bazooka. No, I'm not joking.

If you want a good zombie novel get World War Z. The Morningstar Strain was quite good too but I'm holding judement on that until the sequel comes out.

Mummies with shotguns. Honestly.