Review: Sickest. Zombies. Ever.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 08 21, 2011
Fleshbags is a zombie novella by horror author Gerald Dean Rice. It's not the first time that he's written about the undead, but it was still a bit of surprise for me. It was also the grossest piece of fiction I have ever read. Seriously...Fleshbags is only 77 pages, but it took me as long as a 300-page book to read because I had to keep putting it down to avoid throwing up. We're not just talking about graphic gore - Rice is so incredibly meticulous in his writing, I could actually smell the putrid pus spewed all over his characters."By the time the explosion happened he was dead."Fleshbags has a variety of characters, but less than a handful, so it was easy to keep track of the events unfolding. Rice did a great job of tying their storylines together at the end without forcing the pieces together, as a daycare center becomes the focal point of the plot.The novella is divided up into hours. Hour One sets all the characters into motion, and alludes to the ongoing outbreak. Hour Two is when I nearly hurled all over my Kindle for the first time. By Hour Three, I was genuinely concerned for the people who didn't know about the naked infected people running around the city, harboring transparent bags of flesh that appeared to contain black intestines. I was also questioning the common sense of the folks not bright enough to run away from people who had pus pouring from every orifice on their faces, even if those infected hadn't shed their clothes and mutated yet.After the tremendous suspense in Hour Four, flashbacks in Hour Five, and suspicious military activity in Hour Six, Hour X had me going out of mind. The attacking Fleshbags weren't exactly easy to put down for good either. The ending was too hasty for me, hence the four stars, but I found out after reading it that there will be a sequel.