Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #55892 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-01
• Binding: Paperback

Synopsis
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.

Customer Reviews

Poor ending
I quite enjoyed the first two books in this trilogy. However the third was a real disappointment, in my opinion the ending was rubbish and ultimately seemed rather hurried. I would not recommend this book to anyone because the ending was such an anticlimax!

Not as good as the first two books
This is the third and (hopefully) final installment of the 'Monster' series, following on from 'Monster Island' and 'Monster Nation'. The first book was great - it had all the things that a good zombie story should have and a couple of twists. The second book was hardly related to the first, but also enjoyable in its own right. I assumed that the third book would bring the two together and form some sort of conclusion. In a way it does, but to be honest you could skip 'Monster Nation' and not miss much of the story.

This third book contains too many deviations from the typical zombie novel in my opinion. I had trouble figuring out who was doing what and why and there were far too many 'super zombies' for my liking. Towards the end I didn't really care who lived or died, and it didn't seem to make much of a difference to the characters either.

I guess if you're a zombie-holic then you could do worse than read this book, but you're definitely better off starting and the beginning of the trilogy (and maybe stopping after the second part).

Who will be left standing?
The third part of the Monster trilogy unites most of the characters who made it (and didn't make it) from the first two books. For readers who haven't read the first two books, I guess this would make it a bit difficult to figure out what's going on - I had trouble at times and I had read them!

The book also revisits some locations from the first two books, being mainly set in America.

A problem with the book is that it becomes a bit difficult towards the end to know who to "root for" in that some of the characters seem to have quite valid reasons for what they're doing, although this causes them to come into conflict (perhaps this is a good thing for the book as it makes things less clear-cut). For example, is it better to just kill everyone, or should the thinking zombies try and build a new society?

For me, the most interesting part of the book occurs about halfway through, and involves the character Aayan (I don't want to say too much as it would spoil the story).

However, as with the other two books, I found the "superpowers" of the thinking zombies to be a bit much to take - super-fast zombies, hairy werewolf zombies, healing zombies, invisible zombies, magic tree growing zombies etc. It started to feel less like a novel about zombies and more like a novel about an alliance of superheroes. The concept though of zombies who have their hands sawn off and their arms whittled down to spikes was pretty gross stuff! And I liked how Wellington had incorporated still-living human cultists into the book.

This is an ambitious trilogy - perhaps over-ambitious. But Wellington is a good writer and I look forward to seeing more of his work.