Review: It Had Potential
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 03 30, 2013
Okay so I'm getting into ebooks now, so this was the first zombie novel that I read on an e-reader, and frankly this was a disappointment.The story is pretty basic.  You've got an average guy who has an average job and he is there when the zombie apocalypse happens and this is the story of him getting home to his family and getting them to safety.  It's not a bad formula for a story, but this writer just didn't know how to make the characters interesting or make the reader invested what was happening in the story.***SPOILERS***  ***SPOILERS***  ***SPOILERS***Right off the bat, the main character of David is just bland and not interesting at all.  He has no characteristics that define him as a person other than he is a salesman who loves his family.  Also right at the beginning I could tell that his best friend Barry was going to die and sure enough in like 10 pages he was fed to the meat grinder that was the zombie horde.Also David's antics are just very unrealistic.  David is racing up and down fire escapes, leaping from rooftop to rooftop, shimmying across power lines over the heads of legions of the undead and climbing trees with cat-like proficiency.In a later scene he is swimming in a river and a motorboat runs him over but miraculously he is not ripped to shreds by the blades of the motor.  Instead of this being a very dangerous near death experience that would leave 99.9999% of people it happens to dead, David shrugs it off and continues on his way completely unscathed.Later David gets home to his family and they race off to his daughter's school to get supplies but they run into two thugs who are only interested in robbing David and his family of everything they have.  They point a gun at David and demand the keys to the truck he is driving and all the food and medical supplies they have gathered.  Instead David starts slinging them a line of BS about how shooting him will infect them as well.  This really had me rolling my eyes.  If these guys were supposed to be our villains, why didn't they just shoot him, take what they wanted, and be on their way?  Why sit around talking to him?  Plus why do they want his truck?  They already have one of their own.  Having a second vehicle will only mean twice the fuel consumption and twice the probability of a breakdown.  Then again maybe I'm giving the villains of this story a little too much credit.So David tricks them, steals their gun, shoots one of them in the leg and shoots one of the tires of their truck and races off with his family.  But then our villains are racing up behind them.  Yes, that whole bullet in the leg to one of the crooks and a popped tire didn't even slow them down at all.  Later the villain's truck smashes into a few wrecked cars and results in a full head-on collision.  Yet they are able to just put their truck in reverse and continue pursuit of David and his family with little to no reduction in the speed of their vehicle.  Yeah right :-PThe ending is stolen from a combination of the end of chapter three of the video game Left 4 Dead 2 and the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake.  We have a battle at a boat dock while our characters are racing to get to a boat with the undead at their heels and one of the main characters is forced to sacrifice themselves in order to save the others.***END SPOILERS***  ***END SPOILERS***  ***END SPOILERS***The story is only mildly interesting, the characters are bland and forgettable and the ending is predictable and a rip-off to boot.  I only recommend this for zombie fans who want to kill time and enjoy free Kindle downloads.