Juggernaut by Adam Baker
My rating: 4/5 cats
juggernaut!!
so this is number 0.5 in the series, published several years after #1, Outpost, and roughly two months before #2, Terminus. got that? and if outpost was the thing with metal-zombies (and it was), this one is clearly three kings with metal zombies.
and i loved it.
yes, it is ANOTHER zombie book, and as much as i do still love the zombies, there is a sense of “enough, already.” but they are never gonna stop writing love stories, and they are probably never going to stop writing zombie stories. unless the world is taken over by zombies and everyone is too busy trying to stay alive to waste time writing stories. which could happen.
but adam baker is no fool—he knows that to write a well-received zombie story today, you gotta give it something different. we are all supersaturated with the shambly zombies in torn plaid shirts like they all came from the nineties, moaning and hungering for braaaains.
so he creates a zombie scenario that is not virus-based. it is an organism that has come from space, and once it arrives on earth, it gets in you and turns the insides of you all metallic and spiky, right before it erases your you-ness and turns “you” into a shell containing a parasitic organism hell-bent on finding more and more hosts. and you know this would look way cool in movie-form.
the writing is very smart, too, in that cinematic way. it opens with a runaway train tearing through the desert in iraq, from which two women are extracted; wounded and only half-conscious, and brought to a terrible war-ravaged hospital, with arterial spray all over the walls and people trying to steal the watches off the patients. then it flashes back to show us who these women are: two members of a team of mercenaries who had gone into the desert on a tip that there was a truck full of gold, abandoned and forgotten, which they had intended to obtain as their last big score before retiring.
and how it all went wrong.
adam baker has a strong sense of timing, and a facility with thick detail. there is a great emphasis on the military aspects of the story: the weaponry and transportation and tactical maneuvers and protocol. i can’t say that i have ever read a military thriller—they just never appealed to me. but he managed to hold my interest entirely, spinning out this story of highly trained rogue soldiers with distinct backgrounds and psychological motivations and holding off on the zombies for so long i almost forgot this was a zombie book. but i was deeply engaged—i was never like “gimmie my zombies!” as i may have ordinarily been. it’s a smart way to widen the appeal factors of your book, and to draw in the military crowd, who might not ordinarily pick up a zombie book. the details of the heist are gripping, and the war stories and horrors these mercenaries have seen in their military experience are just as brutal as the things that happen once the zombies arrive. and the combination may sound a little strange, but i think it works well.
i personally loved the characters. i think they were more successfully fleshed-out than those in outpost; a much more slowly-paced book which suited its plot perfectly, but whose characters seemed a little black-and-white to me. here there is a little more gray, and there is just better construction, especially the character of lucy, the female leader of the mercenaries. having an englishwoman leading a military party into the desert could easily have become some sort of crazy sci-fi fantasy tough-girl situation (since we are still observing the cinematic sensibilities of the author), but she comes across as very realistic and female, which in a genre where women are frequently either so tough that they have been effectively neutered or tough in that self-destructive hyper-sexed adrenaline-junky way, she rings true. her thoughts and decisions are psychologically realistic, and she is a pragmatic leader not without empathy.
to me, she is the star, although the other characters are also well-developed.
i would love to know how i could get my hands on a copy of terminus, which may only be available in england right now. outpost was also difficult to track down, but i am thrilled that bill thompson snagged me a copy, so i could do this adam baker exchange with mike reynolds. fortunately, both books can completely be read as stand-alones, so if you can’t get to outpost, you can read this one and be totally content.
rarrrr
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