G. Jefford

Mark Tufo, you have never failed to deliver.

Revisado: 09-11-24

I would recommend this book to anyone who has read the previous books in the series, only because I wouldn’t want anyone to read it first and then kick his own ass for having missed the other ones.

I like the first person aspect of the majority of this and other books. I love the characters of Mike and BT and the members of the family including Tommy. I like the sarcasm and frequent interludes or tangents that could be expected from anyone writing a journal. I like the worlds Mark Tufo has created and their points of contact. I especially have loved a zombie apocalypse story that’s funny, horrible, but not nihilistic (which is why I had generally hated the horror genre).

And Sean Runette is an EXCELLENT narrator! I know I’ll always have a good time with him on the job.

Finally, in all my years of reading, I haven’t had anyone who has provided as much consistent enjoyment as Mark Tufo and my Audible purchases demonstrate this.

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Yet Another Very Enjoyable Hystad Story

Revisado: 04-26-24

I love first person narration and the job done by this narrator was excellent.

The story was complex and great about the way things were revealed, both about the characters and the overall action.

It’s always good to see characters that are not two dimensional and that some who are seemingly bad may yet undergo redemption.

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Lost Journals? Still good.

Revisado: 01-06-24

I wish I had read this one in order. Why? I would have cared MUCH more about Mac and Wilkes when they showed up in subsequent volumes. So it was a good read. Now I will have to re-read the next volume again to see what happens to that insane little prick lieutenant.

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Would have been nicer if…

Revisado: 03-28-22

It would have been WAY more enjoyable if Audible would VERY clearly label each book in a series with the name of the series and the number that book is in the series. I really should not have to do a Google search to discover the order. This is a recurring though inconsistent problem mostly due to Audible plastering an “Audible exclusive” or some such label on TOP of identifying characteristics.

And then when I finished another Tufo series, I was given the (not helpful) “you may enjoy” link to the FIFTH book in this particular series. Why not a link to the FIRST book in the series?

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A VERY Enjoyable Series

Revisado: 02-08-22

So, at the outset just to nip in the bud any hasty remarks by any editor of these reviews or easily-offended Karens given to trying to post their hysterical responses to reviews (and we all know who you are)—everything that follows A. goes directly to the purpose of evaluating this series, B. is not gratuitous, and C. provides the needed context of the greater world of recorded books and those who read them. Besides, I’m a paying customer, have been so for years, buy significantly more product than my monthly credit, and have well over four decades listening to recorded books, so what I have to say really is important for those who produce such books to hear.

There are three important things to note about anyone telling a story:

1. There are some authors whose ability with the English language is excellent but whose ability in creating a really satisfying story completely sucks.

2. There are a number of authors whose ability with the English language is excellent and whose storytelling ability is commensurate with that.

3. There are some authors whose storytelling ability is excellent, who can create entirely believable worlds and easily suspend the eff out of my disbelief, who can create characters with distinct personalities, and who can create characters the reader genuinely cares about, whether deeply loving or thoroughly detesting them, but whose abilities with certain basics of the English language leave room for improvement. There are two remedies for this; they are overlapping and both indispensable: A. Continued experience with the English language and B. A good editor.

The author of this series belongs to the third category and the publishing company has let him down by failing to provide a good editor.

The level of clunkiness was not extreme, diminished over the course of the series, and mostly consisted of things like this: “…he took a deep inhale…he released his exhale…” or “…he hovered a finger over…” or the use of “ground” to refer to the floor of a building or vehicle, and other things of this nature. The actual sentence structure was generally very good and seldom any problems with disparity between subject and verb with respect to number other than the typical use of “they” to refer to a single individual and probably done out of habit arising from absurd fear of using “he” or “she” and related pronouns, too often seen nowadays among either the pronoun paranoid or the pronoun pathological who have been working like busy little beavers to instill in the former the aversion to the realities of languages with pronouns that refer to both gender and number. There are other ways around most of them and a good editor could have suggested them. As for the rest, take a stand. If a character is female, use “she” and “her” and if male, have the balls or at least respect for the English language to use “he,” “his,” and “him” and strike a blow against the abuse of literature by these political linguistic terrorists.

That said, I will gladly spend more money on other books by this author because his storytelling ability is strong and will only continue to grow at the same time the number of verbal clunkers will decrease.

The narrator is always important and either enhances (such as Frank Muller, Oliver Wyman, or Barbara Rosenblat, to mention a few of the greats) or ruins a story (such Stephen King or Balki. I refer to an actor from Beverly Hills Cop by a character name from his TV series. His narration (sometimes extremely good—basic qualities of voice and characterization are always good, other times extremely bad—the narration equivalent of purple prose; for example, the phrase “he heard the claws scraping across the floor” adequately conveys what’s going on; no one needs to hear the slow, exaggerated pronunciation of the word “scraaaaaping”) is so inconsistent that I will never risk another credit on it—and I buy a LARGE number of extra credits every month). This narrator does a very good job, with no over-acting, and will only get better; and he has many years to go before he reaches the age of George Guidall.

I recommended the audio recording of this series and look forward to others by this author and narrator. I will purchase the next in the series as soon as I hit submit (but, please, anybody at Audible that can get the word to Balki to knock it the hell off so I can purchase books he narrates and enjoy rather than endure them, I’d appreciate it.

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One of the best combinations of story, characters, and an excellent reader

Revisado: 10-04-21

I have listened to recorded books for well over thirty years. This story arc over the eight books was one of my most enjoyable listening experiences. Every book was delightful, funny, detailed, believable, and thoughtful. I had the first three free and bought each of the rest as soon as I was done with the previous one.

Fred Berman I place in the top five of all male readers I’ve enjoyed over the past 30 years, right up there with Oliver Wyman and Frank Muller.

Thank you, Lindsay Buroker for such a great experience. I look forward to more books from you.

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A Very Satisfying Story

Revisado: 06-17-21

I thought both the preceding 5 books of The Last Survivors and these final 4 did a very good job of portraying life three hundred years post-apocalypse? How do I know? Because the stories are similar to what happened to many throughout history (and from what has been recovered, throughout prehistory) when one kind of calamity or other has destroyed what those living in them must have thought would be the stable standard of civilization—until it suddenly was not and they were forced to adapt or die.

I’ve read some reviews by folks who were shocked over the brutality depicted, as though that marred the story. These obviously are people who have led a sheltered life in the modern world free of any understanding from history about the way things usually have been. Maybe these stories could serve as a vaccine against the rude awakening they, more likely than not, will soon have. There was never a Rebecca of Sunnybrook Apocalypse.

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Still One of the Most Enjoyable Stories Since Junior High

Revisado: 06-01-21

The characters are all very distinctive and have depth. Both the story and the interplay between the characters are delightful. The narrator is superb.

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One of the Most Enjoyable Reads Since Junior High

Revisado: 05-27-21

The story was very enjoyable and the performance was extremely good.

The author created an entire world and peopled it with very solid characters.

As soon as I submit this review, I will download the next in the series.

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Let’s Hope It Gets Better Once It’s Emerged

Revisado: 05-18-21

The story’s rationale, as such, is okay.

Meg, the main female character, though, is an inexplicable, almost schizophrenic, mess of disparate emotional turmoil. Supposedly she’s a firefighter who participates in Ironman competitions, but she’s so labile emotionally that over a course of a hours she radically swings between crying in a ball in the street to taking off with a fire ax after monsters so deadly that Marines are incapable of fighting them to being wracked with guilt over having been able to save so few people of the scores she had seen being jumped and getting their faces eaten off.

And, for someone who is not a newbie firefighter, but a veteran, she displays an incredible amount of stupidity to think that she, a chick in a mask and heavy firefighter protective clothing, is in any realistic position to help armed Marines against the monsters by running around through their fields of fire armed with an ax and chanting an empowering mantra from her grandma about not giving up, all the while stewing in existential angst about the situation and wondering if maybe it was all pointless.

The same goes for the main male character, Jed, supposedly a five year Marine veteran out on a dishonorable discharge which he engineered to get out of Iraq and back stateside. Really? It took him five years of chafing under what he considered to be pointless military bullshit that seemed, to him, to have been almost purposefully designed to isolate, alienate, and harm him? He seems to be almost the disaffected alter ego caricature of the white guy pretending to be the black guy pretending to be some other guy in Tropic Thunder. At least that character was entertaining.

Which brings us to the absolutely painful job of narration done by Bronson Pinchot. The actual quality of his voice is good. His ability to do vocal styles of the different characters in dialog is adequate to good. But I wish I could do an audio review so I could berate him unmercifully for his treatment of the intervening prose.

The copyright of this book is 2019 and I have heard him narrate other books well so there is NO excuse for this. Maybe the producer was new and inexperienced and just so jazzed at landing him for the gig that he or she was just too chicken to exercise control and tell him during the first recording session, “Bronson, baby. Just knock that shit right off. When you are reading a descriptive passage that uses the words screeching, scratching, scraping, or clicking, you just read those words—you do NOT say those words in an exaggerated screeeeeching, scraaaaaaping, scraaaaaatching, or CLICKing manner. When you read that someone dropped something with a thud, the word itself calls the experience to mind, saying “with a THUD” is not necessary. Why? Because, like the others, it doesn’t focus our minds on what’s happening in the story but on YOU being over the top in pronouncing the words—dude, the onomatopoeia lies in the nature of the words themselves, not in your pronunciation of them.

“When you’re describing something disgusting, you don’t have to do it with a tone of disgust teetering on the edge of puking. When you’re describing someone as being angry, you don’t have to narrate it an angry manner. Same for sad, puzzled, suspicious, and horny. Same for words like sucking or slurping or breathless or spraying blood.”

If the prose describes someone speaking in an agitated manner, save the agitation for the dialog, not the prose that describes the dialog.

Imagine Snidely Whiplash doing Bullwinkle doing Natasha. Now imagine that in the other sense being done at the same time—that’s how distressing his manhandling of the prose is.

Pull back, Bronson. Pull way, way back. You have a pleasant and well-modulated voice. You rarely mispronounce anything. You don’t have any annoying mannerisms like using glottal stops or smacking your lips or making declarative sentences sound like questions.

That said, I’ll still listen to the sequels because the story still interests me.

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