written by Richard Laymon
published by Leisure
Books
ISBN-10: 0843951850
ISBN-13: 978-0843951851
review by Adam Armstrong
11.25.2008
This dork's holy trinity: sex, violence, and zombies.
Melvin Dobbs's science fair project didn't go over too well. He
tried to bring one of his dead high school classmates back to life with a car
battery. A decade or so later, Melvin is out of the institution and cured, but
he hasn't given up his dreams of resurrecting the dead. Vicki had always been
nice to Melvin even when everyone else picked on him. Now she returns to her
hometown of Ellsworth as a family doctor. Once Melvin finds out, he can't get her
out of his mind and begins to raise people from the dead in order to make Vicki
like him. Once Vicki rejects Melvin he thinks that it may be better if she was
a mindlessly obedient zombie instead.
Laymon's zombies aren't the typical
Romero/Russo mindless flesh eaters that are obviously dead. Which I thought was
kind of cool to take an archetypical horror villain and shake it up a bit. A
great read, Laymon reigns supreme as the king
suspense writers. There was a little too-sweet happy ending of one of the story
arcs that disappointed me a bit as I didn't see it as very realistic (I know,
zombies aren't very realistic either; I speaking in terms of realism in the
given world Laymon established). All the other pieces
fell right into place making this great novel.
Buy it: 4.5 out of 5