Amazon Customer

Bland and Disappointing

Revisado: 02-29-24

After finding Alien: Covenant to be a desperate, clingy failure of a movie (an assessment which gives me no joy. It hurts to be disappointed in a movie with not one but two Michael Fassbenders), I thought perhaps a prequel story might help smooth over some of the narrative of the film. I was definitely wrong. This book is marred with boring side characters with inconsistent behaviors and really inexplicable motivations. The main cast of Covenant are weirdly shunted to the side for this stupid, pointless plot that doesn't elucidate or enhance the film at all. I'm so glad to get to know more about two characters who barely have named roles in the films and who die off camera. Basically, we just find out (spoilers!) they're good at their jobs. So long as those jobs don't include an insane synthetic and a parasitic alien species. And regarding the nonsensical plot, here's an example (SPOILERS): the antagonist is a cult of people who follow someone who has horrendous nightmares about alien creatures. The mere look of terror on his face as he dreams is enough for them to start suicide bombing the WY corporation to "stop humans from colonizing other worlds and thus prevent monsters from discovering and destroying all of humanity". Obviously, we, as audience, are expected to fill in the blanks, but that does nothing to actually make it a believable plot from the perspective of these characters. I don't want to spoil too much, but a major plot point for these baddies is, "Oh, we wish we could show you his dreams, because they SOUND bad, based on what he's told us." Here's the thing: in the film Prometheus, David simply watches the dreams of his crew members as they are in hypersleep. And at this point, that technology would have been decades old. In an assessment which should surprise nobody, I'm pretty sure the writer didn't really bother to note pretty huge details about the first movie to make a consistent narrative. And the biggest sin of this book is that it's boring! So many scenes of endless speculative dialogue that goes nowhere! I hate to spoil the action of the climactic scene of the story where our heroes have to risk death to pull off a daring maneuver to save the ship....or at least I WOULD hate to spoil it if it happened to our heroes on the bridge. Instead, we are treated to our heroes waiting in tense silence for several minutes while SOMEONE ELSE carries out this thrilling and death defying feat! Was there a production budget that ran over for the writing of the novel or something that it would be too expensive to show the actual action?? I will end by saying that I had no problem with the voice acting. that was great. However, no amount of solid acting can make up for a terrible, boring mess.

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Delightfully Absurd

Revisado: 11-24-21

Super fun premise and laugh out loud moments. Over the top characters, which is what you expect when you combine the worlds of professional wrestling, cooking conventions and zombies, right? Jones creates a tale that keeps you guessing! Sowers does a great job with the voices and was the perfect vocal choice to read this story; however, a little more care in the editing would have been much appreciated!

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A Touching Final Chapter

Revisado: 08-20-20

As a die-hard Romero fan, through thick and thin, this book was made for someone like me. It is full of love and care for this genre and the message that Romero has been nurturing for decades - about zombie lore, about society, and about human nature. The chapter structure, bouncing between our main characters as the dead rose, and the cataloguing of their stories in some grand swan-song of bureaucratic efficiency was everything I hoped it would be. The writing was long in description and often took some unnecessary tangents, but to serve the purpose of enriching the people who lived and died in these pages. The story, you can tell, is a true labor of love between the creator of an entire genre of horror, and a denizen, who -- like myself -- obsessed and loved the many, many iterations of this genre for years on end. My biggest frustration is due to my technical ear. [EDIT: I am going to leave my original comments on here because I do think the production has issues, however I had said that the production was no labor of love. That's entirely not fair at all. The choice to have Lori Cardille narrate this book was deliberate, and made to honor and love the story, as she was the main protagonist Sarah in the 1985 film Day of the Dead -- AND her father, Bill, "Chilly Billy" Cardille was the main on the ground reporter in the original Night of the Living Dead. Clearly, this production was full of thoughtful choices to honor Romero's legacy]
Con: The production was given no critical editing eye, or rather, ear. The readers tried as they might, but there were few distinct characters between the two of them. Several words were mispronounced often enough to be cringe inducing, and more than a dozen times, whole sentences are repeated. This in an attempt to seam together different takes from the narrators with emotional emphases that were not quite right. It was jarring and frustrating and pulled me out of the story. If an editor can comb through this and pull these roughshod seams together into a better presentation, it would make all the difference.

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