Review of FORWARD, SHAMBLE! by Joshua Calkins-Treworgy

BooksForABuck.com, November 2009

Bob the Zombie managed to escape Detroit (in Motor City Shambler), but now he and his fellow zombies are starving in Flint, Michigan. Inside a former community center, the human residents put up a fearsome resistance and the Zombies--generally a slow-thinking lot--seem doomed to starve rather than enjoy that nice human flesh. Fortunately for them, Bob is one of the rare thinking zombies. He comes up with a plan to use hammers and a chainsaw to gain entrance.

For the zombies, any success is temporary. They need to eat living or recently dead humans to keep their semi-alive bodies from collapsing. Success in Flint is merely one step in a journey after more food, more human bodies. Meanwhile government scientists are kidnapping zombies. Soon, we fear, the humans will find a counter to the undead shamblers--but Bob intends to save as many of his fellow zombies for as long as he can.

Author Joshua Calkins-Treworgy (see more BooksForABuck.com reviews of novels by Calkins-Treworgy) has fun taking the standard zombie character (slow-moving, mindless, flesh-eating) and using this as the basis for a story. We don't see Bob breaking down into the arms-out shamble the way we did in MOTOR CITY SHAMBLER, but he's very much in zombie mode--albeit with a bit more intelligence than the standard zombie.

If you're looking for a story with an unusual protagonist, a fun story line, and that whole flesh-eating thing, you'll definitely want to grab a copy of FORWARD, SHAMBLE!

Four Stars

Reviewed 1/12/09--11/16/09

FORWARD, SHAMBLE! is available in multiple eBook formats for only $3.99. (Available in HTML, Adobe PDF, eReader, Mobipocket/Kindle, Microsoft Reader, Sony Reader and ePub formats).

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See the review at Untreed Reads.