Soze Says

I like skiing and the snow that comes with it. I like zombies. I like reading stories set in my home country. So I thought Ice Station Zombie: A Post Apocalyptic Chiller was going to be a home run for me.

Instead, it was barely a popped fly ball

Baseball euphemisms aside, Ice Station Zombie lacked many of the components I consider essential to a decent zombie apocalyptic read. There was no tension-filled beginning, or relatable characters who avoided being overly cliched. Likewise, there was a severe deficit when it came to how much of a threat the zombies posed.

Gurley instead serves up an opening that happens so quickly I assumed I had somehow missed the first book in a series and this one was looking at the fall of the world from a different perspective. Yet as far as I could determine, this was not the case. The characters here are mostly straight up stereotypes. Every major Australian character, for example, is either a loner Crocodile Dundee type, or a salt-of-the-earth bear of a man who knows how to do everything. Sigh. And then there's the fact that almost no characters who survive the fall of the world is killed by the zombie infestation. No, it's yet again humans killing humans, as we are found to be the true monsters in a world of monsters.

The writing technically is fine - I can say that for Ice Station Zombie - aside from numerous grammatical and spelling errors which a copy editor really should have caught. There's even a chapter by-line which incorrectly labels the action as taking place on one continent, when it is very clearly taking place on the other.

So, sadly, this was a big miss for me. Others might like to try it with far lower expectations that I brought in.

1.5 Nanite-Powered Undead Uprisings for Ice Station Zombie.