The Rising by Brian Keene

Books are my preferred medium for zombies mostly because it keeps zombies where they can do the most damage----YOUR BRAIN. So when I found Brian Keene in an issue of Previews (he's coming out with a zombie comic book, which I will probably review in a few months wink wink) I was drawn to read his first zombie novel The Rising.

There are good things and bad things about this novel. We'll start with the good.

Firstly, Brian Keene is extremely good at being creepy. The whole novel is littered with eloquently eerie descriptions of gore, decaying musculature and the visceral rending of human flesh. This coupled with some horrendously evil human bad-guys whose list of misdeeds includes feeding an offending body part through a hole in the wall of an enclosure filled with hungry ghouls.
Like all really good zombie media the real draw is the living not the living dead; Brian Keene obviously understands this theme and uses it to its advantage. You find yourself rooting for the zombies in order to teach the depraved villains a lesson.  From the gory aspect, Keene's book has all the required elements

Secondly I really enjoyed his writing style. You come to feel like you know these characters and all of them are three-dimensional and very different from one another. A lot of times in horror literature (especially literature without the benefit of pictures like comic books have) the characters are the same basic frame with a different name. Not so in this novel, each character is very different, dialogue and behavior defining each person totally. The writing style also made the book an easy read without making it boring.

Now for the things I didn't like.
The Zombies. GAH! Why is it when someone comes along who is obviously a zombie fan they have to make some huge change! The Zombies in this novel THINK. They are capable of STRATEGY. Capable of using TOOLS!  It totally ruins it for me. While that in itself makes the zombies all the more frightening, it simply diminishes to zombie-ness. It makes the novel about something else. Zombies are mindless eating machines. Not evil undead masochists. Not only are the ghouls capable of speech, that have an odd black humor that is in itself horrifying, because often times the ghoul is a dead family member of the person they're speaking to and are using their relationship with the living to torment (undead fetus...enough said). But I reiterate...they aren't zombies, at least not to me.

Beyond that distinction, animals are also capable of becoming Zombies. Bunnies, gophers, lions, birds, monkeys, mice, dogs and cats. All zombies, all capable of speech (kind of) and of strategizing with the human zombies in order to coordinate attacks with the human population. Granted this is fantasy but that just seems extremely for lack of a better term "out there".

Another thing I dislike is IT JUST ENDS. The book ends at an extremely climatic scene which in itself may not be a bad thing (especially since I don't have to wait for the next book to be released, all I have to do is go buy it. I can't imagine what this must have been like 4 years ago when the book was released initially). And while it is a common thread in Zombie media to let the film, book, comic etc just end leaving the audience hungering (pun intended) over what happened to their heroes, I HATE IT WHEN BOOKS DON'T HAVE CLOSURE.  To me its just lazy and it irritates me.

Taking that all into account this was a interesting read and a good horror novel that completely creeped me out....in a good way. Judging from this book Brian Keene has a talent for the creepy and an affluent desire to create a wholly new zombie style. I will read his other books with fervor and enjoy them immensely.