Soze Says

I doubt anybody looking for literary horror would proceed further than reading the title of something like Beer Run of the Dead, but just in case, let me be clear: This is a book for readers seeking something light-hearted, incredibly dumb and almost as fun.

Author D. F. Noble revels in creating a low-brow, ridiculous look at how a bunch of less-than-stellar individuals might band together to survive the dead coming back to life to devour the living. Of course, it helps that said group stumbles upon the cure to the infection which causes the zombie plague, and that it just so happens to be the alcohol that they base their lives around...

Well, that applies to two out of three members of our not-quite heroic trio. High-schooler Kip is by far the most likeable of the bunch, and it's his growth through the novel that provides the most appealing of character arcs. But let's face it, no-one who reads this book is likely to care about this type of thing. Most will probably like Rock and his buddy Steady just fine, even though they are two of the more deplorable characters I've spent more than a chapter with in a very long time.

But is Beer Run of the Dead funny? I'd say it starts out that way, but like far too many comedies, most of the laughs are spent in the first third of the book, and by the end I was relying on the good will generated early on to see me through. Rock and Steady, as well as a couple of other folks they encounter along the way, simply began to grate too much.

The writing is pretty much what you'd expect for an endeavour like this: simple and straight-forward. I caught a few incorrectly used tenses here and there, but other than that this is the type of sentence you can expect on a regular basis:

His asshole is puckered so tight you couldn't throw a dart in it.

Judge how you will ...

All in all, Beer Run of the Dead probably isn't as funny as it would like to be, but it is fun and dumb, and therefore does enough to earn my (qualified) recommendation.

3 Puckered Up Assholes for Beer Run of the Dead.