Hey look guys, it's yet another book about zombies being inserted into a crazy time period. This time it's Nazi Germany.....or actually Haiti during World War II. I have complained in Zombie History of the US that if zombie history books needed a future, then it has to do more than just to stick zombies into a time period without any context or style. Then somehow I get this e-mail about getting a review copy of Zombies vs. Nazis so I did and here we are. Let's see if this zombie book does better.
It's the time of World War II. It's still in the early stages so Germany is kicking everybody's asses and taking their territory. But the Germans are not one to be complacent so they send three inspectors into Haiti to learn the way of the zombie. The thought process is that if the Nazis control zombies then they would have an army that would truly be unstoppable and the Third Reich would truly last a thousand years with all of it's original members.
The book is all in communiques that the inspectors sent out to their superior officer with the exception with a brief preface from the author explaining what we're about to read(with very unnecessary snarky bits and it's in red so it's color-coded for your convenience!) and two unclassified US documents about uncovering these communique. And this is, by far, the smartest thing the book did. It keeps things terse, fast-paced and exciting. If it was written like a normal fictional narrative, the results would have been disastrous. It would've been Plague of the Dead all over again.
And then the book does a rather big mistake. The aforementioned preface is all about "Humans shouldn't meddle in raising the dead unless they want to be eaten" and then betrays that with the standard "Humans are Bastards" theme. On the surface they may be the same thing but one thing suggests that we're not going to have the old tired zombie cliche that humans are worse that George Romero has beaten to death, resurrected and killed again and the other thing....does. Guess which path the book goes?
Additionally, there's some illustrations in this book and quite a few of them. They're all bright, colorful and cartoony...and in the end, not very good. To me, it just seems half-assed and lazy. The backgrounds are just splashes of color with little attempt at creating anything there. The people are really blocky and two of them are rather samey. And it does the cardinal sin of mis-matching the images with the words since I thought one of the Inspectors was actually one of the Voodoo priests.
In the end, however, I do like this. It does do something more that just stick zombies in some time period and just let them do wacky hijinks. It's short, a very fast read and has some decent action. While it's doesn't really do much with a high-concept title like Zombies vs. Nazis it's still quite entertaining.
7/10
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