Monster Island

I will start off this post by saying that I loved everything about this novel. The way that it was formatted as a blog post per chapter so that it was open to the public, the chapters short and easy to read with good basic story writing and interesting characters was brilliant. It was brilliant because this is the first time and only time I've ever heard of anything like that and it had the talented writing to back it up. That was the first step David Wellington did right when tackling such a project as a zombie based novel. I'm implying that a zombie novel is difficult because there isn't much one can do that has not been done already. We have almost seen every angle that can be taken of zombies including to inside of the zombie itself. However, David cleverly found a loophole by writing from the point of view of a kind of hybrid between undead and human. This way not only are we getting the suspense of trying to live through the zombie apocalypse as a human in an infested world but also trying to "live" in an infested world with humans trying to kill you. We also get the opportunity to theorize what exactly it would feel like to be zombified with dying tissue, organs, and muscle matter since we live through the experience as the character does. The very fact that Gary medically kept his brain in tact during the transformation so that he kept some of his humanity because the hope of surviving completely human was slim to none, was a genius piece of plot that, in my opinion, made this novel.

The blog posts themselves are interesting because, as I said, they aren't significantly long. A reader can easily get through 10-11 hours within an hour if they're hooked and I'm sure the majority will be. We're in the day and age where we have seen almost anything and crave for the new. Now there are many novels coming out with the "bad guy" point of view, skewing the original stories to make a completely new one with different moral and value sets. This is another such work however it's extra appeal is that it reads like a comic book. At the end of each page is yet another twist that keeps the reader hooked until the next "issue". The characters have very distinct characterizations that make it easy for the audience to picture in their heads and follow their actions even though there aren't any physical pictures of them anywhere. It's hard to help after the first few pages not to have a favorite character that you hope will make it to the end but sometimes die within the blink of an eye. My only wish is that this DOESN'T become a comic. As it is, this novel is extremely interesting because it's the first I've read that reads like a sequential piece without it becoming one and actually making it one will ruin some of the original texts charm.