Review: A new, refreshing take on the genre
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 02 24, 2013
Azina is a mercenary, the no-nonsense female leader of a group of misfits who earn their living as hired guns. A group of ‘prospectors’, searching for the forgotten wealth of a planet struggling to rebuild two centuries after a zombie plague, have gone missing in a sealed bunker. Azina and her team of diverse mercenaries are assigned to find the small group. Once inside the bunker they stumble upon a buried city and things quickly turn chaotic. The city isn’t as deserted as they thought, and what crawls from the darkness is a horror mankind thought it’d never see again.Hive, by Griffin Hayes, is a short novella which feels shorter than it is because the outstanding prose drags you along at breakneck speed. The characters have their quirks but each one is identifiable and come alive off the page; even Bron, a larger than life man outfitted in steel plates with twin 20mm cannons built into his arms. He’s some dude you definitely want on your side. But the joy of this book’s characters is the lead, Azina: told in first person present tense, the musings of Azina are simply awesome, and immediately pull you into her skin.“Pennies is fiddling with the cuff of his tunic. His eyes keep dropping to my breasts and I’m a second away from knocking his teeth straight into his nasal cavity.” There, right there, on page one, you know Azina is not to be messed with and you instantly admire her demeanor and bad-ass attitude.The world Hayes creates inside the crumbling subterranean city is just as life-like as the characters thrust into this horrific situation. It’s Earth, a shopping mall with stores such as Armani, Ralph Lauren, and Chanel—only it’s two hundred years after the zombie apocalypse and the place is a collapsing hell-hole filled with the nightmares of past horrors. And these horrors lend a new, refreshing take on the genre, which only serve to increase their danger, and heighten the tension of Azina and her gang, trapped in the depths with them.Perhaps you think I’m gushing with too much praise, but like dark blood gushing from the cleaved skull of an undead Zee, this praise is worth being spilled.