Plague of the Dead: The Morningstar Strain reviewed

Well, I'm going to be straight up honest with you guys.  This may be the hardest review that I have ever written.  It's not because it's very good or very bad since those reviews are fun and easy to write.  It's not even because it's forgettable for I remember the emotions I had while reading this.  No, the hardest thing is that while I was looking this up I found out that the author, Z.A. Recht, died back in December.  As in nearly two and a half months before this review was published.  So all the piss and vinegar I had coming in to beat this book like it deserves to be beaten has gone.  I can't muster the anger for this book because I don't want to disrespect the guy.  However, I am not going to lie and say I like this book when I don't....so let's carefully tread the line as we dive into Plague of the Dead: The Morningstar Strain.

So there's this virus called Morningstar that really messes you up.  You get fevers, paranoia and a craving for murder and flesh.  Then you die and after a while you come back...as a zombie!  It originates in Africa and soon Africa is quarantined with a defensive perimeter established at the Suez canal led by General Sherman.  But that falls apart pretty quickly as it spreads across the world.  Meanwhile in Washington DC, an Army doctor, disgusted with what's been going on the US Front, decides to leak her reports to investigative reporter, Julie whatever-her-last-name was.  But the NSA arrest them for treason and now they must get out to warn the world.

So there is one thing that I won't do in this review and no disrespecting the memory of the author doesn't count.  It's comparing this to World War Z and there's a simple reason.  They came out around the same time so it's impossible to say "Oh, this ripped this off" and whatnot.  Also, this deals with the zombie apocalypse in the present while World War Z was more of an after-action report.  The problem with this approach is that it's very hard to accurately describe the impact and destruction of such an event, Stephen King tried doing that in Cell and he utterly failed at it.  However, maybe to his credit, Recht doesn't dwell on the destruction very much but he does something almost as bad.  He made this into a Roland Emmerich disaster movie only without the fun trash that makes an Emmerich movie entertaining to watch.  You know what really would have worked?  In the beginning, we see e-mails between Sherman and the Army doctor and I wonder, why couldn't the whole book gone the Dracula route and be written in the style of e-mails, memos, briefings and communiques among other things.  It would have worked marvelously and instead we just get...that.  However, I will give him credit for one thing.  He combines the running infected like the ones from 28 Days Later with real slow-moving zombies.  Granted he focuses on the running ones but to see both types co-exist is a decent idea.

Of course with one decent ideas I was buried underneath of cliches and stock dialogue.  General Sherman is the grizzled old general who knows Shakespeare and that makes him smart and cultured.  There's a reporter who will do anything to get her story including hacking into databases.  There's the unfeeling NSA Agents including one who discovers his conscience and goes rogue.  I mean you can literally plot out the course of  the book with a couple sentences of character description.  Who will live, who will die and what they even say are all there just waiting for you to read it and groan.  But the worst offender is that this book fit in one of those honorable unarmed mono-eh-mono fights for no reason in a situation that doesn't make any sense.

I'm sorry but this book sucks.  You can literally predict exactly what happens.  The characters are all one-dimensional.  The action scenes lack any tension.  The narration is pretty much Ed Woodian but without that naive charm he had.  There's plot points that goes nowhere so a damn sequel could be written, which there is and a third one in the works before Recht's death.  The only worth in this is that it is nice to see how a zombie story as told through Roland Emmerich may look like and the fact that running zombies and normal zombies co-exist.  And I do realize that some people may like it if they really like novelizations of disaster movies more than the actual movies but if you want a good zombie novel, stick with World War Z.

4/10