Review: Difficulty connecting with the characters
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 06 16, 2014
I've been meaning to read Slow Burn for about two years, ever since it was released. Unfortunately, other books and hobbies got in the way and in the meantime it went from being a small press book to being picked up by the top dogs of zombie fiction – Permuted Press. While there are stylistic improvement that came along with the jump to a bigger publisher, the major stumbling blocks of this book sadly remained behind.The premise of Slow Burn is promising. It chronicles the actions of five police officers as they experience an increasingly chaotic day on patrol, which soon degenerates into an all-out zombie apocalypse. While some authors are not good at writing action prose, this not the case with Slow Burn. The authors know how to write action well and they clearly convey what is going on to the reader in a lively manner. They also have a clear understanding and familiarity with police procedure and lingo that adds a certain undeniable level of authenticity to the main characters.As order quickly breaks down, the officers find themselves trying to survive and scrounge up supplies while also facing a variety of human threats as well. Over time, the cause for the outbreak and the people become clearer and evolve along with the story. The idea is interesting, and though not totally novel, it is explained and followed through on more thoroughly than in most zombie stories. It was nice to know not only the cause of the zombie plague, but also to get any insight into why the plague occurred as it did – a rarity in the genre.Unfortunately, I found a lot of problems with this book. The grammatical editing is decent (though some typos remain), but the authors used a lot of passive voice, which made sentences just read oddly to me in many cases. The character voice is odd too, and switches between first and third-person throughout the story. It was not a story killer, but I found it a bizarre choice - one that I can't recall seeing in another book.At other times, the level of detail is overboard. This is a long book for a zombie tale, and a chunk of that length goes to explaining things that did not need to be explained. If you're someone who wants to know what the characters bug out bag consists of and the weapon they're using to a T at all times, you'll like this book. Many readers, however, will find the endless explanation of what the characters packed, where they packed it, and intricacies of weaponry tedious. Even as someone who knows their Aimpoint from their EOTech, it even rubbed thin with me by the end. As the novel goes on, the constant action, shooting, and raiding that the characters carry out without a real story arc until late in the book gets tiresome as well. Additionally, the fact that the characters are all preppers drowning in supplies means they are never really feel like they're in danger. Everything is their fingertips (or can be scavenged), and there's never a sense of deprivation that prevails in many of these novels.The dialogue is OK. It's neither great nor awful, though it was a bit awkward throughout. Part of this was the passive voice, but the characters also tended to talk to themselves out loud instead of internally more than an average person would. It tends to stray into "Bro" territory often with phrases like "get some" and “this rocks,” which will be off-putting to some readers.I think the thing that really let me down about the story were the characters though. While this is very much an action zombie book and I wasn't expecting great leaps in character development, I needed to like the characters at least. Unequivocably, I did not. They spend their time talking about how hot the women around them are and staring at various parts of their body, berating unprepared liberals for their lack of survival preparedness and anti-gun status, and making fun of people who are overweight (or just not muscle-bound) or drive hybrids. The libertarian, pro-gun, self-sufficiency tone is the authors' prerogative, even if it feels rather two-dimensional and silly, but the womanizing and other aspects did nothing to make me like the characters. One moment that really stuck out to me was when one of the characters' dog runs off, and he simply laughs and moves on; dead girlfriends rated slightly higher on the remorse scale. Not exactly the kind of person that I find myself rooting for.What it comes down to is that one gets a feeling that the characters feel like they're above the law – they talk about protecting drug addicts from prosecution just because they are dating them, beating handcuffed assailants, and threatening to shoot people if they don't do something like open a gate. I know at least one person on Amazon who is/was a members of law enforcement was upset to be portrayed like this. On the other hand, the people standing against them are almost cartoonishly reprehensible with no redeeming qualities to add any sort of shades of gray to the story.If you like non-stop action, authentic law enforcement speak and gear, and zombies, this might be the book for you. If you like that stuff and/or are looking for characters you can root for, and people finding themselves in desperate straights after the zombie apocalypse then I cannot recommend this book.