Zombie Fallout (Zombie Fallout #1) by Mark Tufo

Zombie Fallout - Mark Tufo

It's flu season and with a particularly virulent strain of the H1N1 virus cutting a swath through the U.S.,  people rush to get the flu shot.  What they don't know is that instead of saving their lives, the shot will turn them into the undead.  Almost overnight, the zombies take over and become bent on feeding themselves.  They're not picky and will eat any body part available. Unfortunately for the survivors, the smallest bite will have them joining the zombie horde.

Mike Talbot had always been a little bit of a of a survivalist and so when the zombie plague hit, he thought that he was well prepared.  His number one mission is to save his family somehow.  Mike is luckier than most in that it seems that divine intervention in the form of the booming voice of Ryan Seacrest and a zombie girlfriend, are determined that he and those he loves will survive.

The zombies in this novel are the slow moving creeping dead that we have become accustomed to.  This is where the standard approach ends because these zombies while not as intelligent as a living breathing human being, have retained some of their smarts.  Talbot first notices this when a zombie attempts to use wire cutters to get at him.  Zombies even have the smarts to herd the remaining humans to make their feasting easier.  A mindless zombie is one thing but one that can grow and learn is another.

In many ways, Zombie Fallout attempted to be funny.  I will admit that there were times I did laugh out loud at the pop culture references like a deity's voice being that of Ryan Seacrest but at time, the childish humor of hey everyone wasn't that a disgusting fart felt puerile.  

As aforementioned, Talbot is a survivalist and even an ex marine.  Before the apocalypse he took his boys out on the weekend to learn to shoot a gun properly.  If one is concerned with survival this makes sense but why did he never bother to teach his daughter or his wife?  Both women were so incompetent they didn't even know how to load a weapon, let alone shoot it, leaving them dependent so to speak on the menfolk.  Talbot takes great care to constantly remind his sons that it is their duty to protect their mother and their sister.  Even with the plague going on and zombies roaming the world, Talbot still didn't teach the women he supposedly loved the most to shoot.  If that were the only problem with the female characters, I could have let it go but there wasn't a single likeable female character in the entire novel. Tracy, Talbots wife spent most of the novel being a shrew.  Though Talbot was a marine, he deferred to her but not out of respect.  I don't even recall a scene where Tracy was involved that didn't include yelling.


All this yelling and of course the zombies themselves were a tough burden on poor dear Talbot who stated, "that a couple more days of this crap and I was going to need some Tampax." 

 

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Source: http://www.fangsforthefantasy.com/2014/01/zombie-fallout-zombie-fallout-1-by-mark.html