ROAD TRIP Z BY M.P. NORMANS: BOOK REVIEW

With its prologue suggesting a less-than-serious approach to the zombie apocalypse, M.P. Normans' Road Trip Z soon discards that levity in favour of grit and bloody action, peppered with plenty of bickering characters.
 
It starts off feeling like SyFy's Z Nation without the cute nicknames, its action beats hitting comic-book levels of over the top. But as it lurches on, it never feels like a truly threatening zombie-fest, even though the living dead here are as greedy as ever. Just as greedy is the attempt to have its rotting cake and eat it, with three different undead variants coming into play – slow, fast, and mutated. Those mutants have gaping, impossibly huge mouths reminiscent of the face-splitting vamps from Blade II, with their attacks coming and going pretty fast, forcing characters into some awkward encounters which just don't happen often enough.
 
For the first quarter of the book, you're mostly left to watch characters puffing their chests out at one another or explaining their backstories in chapters headed with way too obvious signposts. Our heroes also get into the kind of arguments that distract them long enough to get into trouble. It's classic zombie story stuff, only this means very few surprises, and as the cast are mostly pulled from standard archetypes – the grizzled stranger, the sarcastic arsehole, the good guy and so on – they're fairly predictable. None of them stood out as a favourite for me, which is a shame, because the story relies on them far more than the undead.
 
The writing also has a tendency to slip into British slang at random, which detracts from the book's American setting, consisting mostly of desert and ruins, mountains and craters (hey, it is the apocalypse after all). None of the locales our heroes find themselves in are particularly memorable as a result, something which isn't helped by regular callbacks to an action-packed incident in a silo which we never get to see for ourselves. There are also quite a few pop culture references, but quite a few are wrong in a way that doesn't feel deliberate, and the writing is mostly present tense which doesn't manage to lend it the immediacy it seems to be going for.
 
With a languid pace and very few interesting stop-offs, this feels like a painfully long journey to a destination you've probably been to many times before, and though the action ramps up in the final few chapters, it still stops and starts like a Jeep running out of gas. Never quite rising to the heights of other zombie encounters, this is a strictly middle of the road trip.
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Road Trip Z by M.P. Norman

​When the apocalyptic downfall of the world came, it was a terrifying tsunami of tooth and claw.

Two years on, and the plague of all plagues has given the United States a new majority. Democrats and Republicans are no more and humanity is on the endangered list now the dead walk the earth.

After hearing a radio transmission—promising salvation—five friends and an ex-Marine set out on a road trip across the deserts of Utah to a safe zone in Portland. Battling their way across the zombie-infested American wasteland can be treacherous and devastating to the bonds of friendships, and soon, each realizes how easy it is to screw-up at every gruesome corner.

To survive the apocalypse, they must pull together as a family. If not, they will be just another meal for the ravenous dead.

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Ben got a taste for terror at age nine, watching The Thing from behind his parent's sofa. He’s a big fan of extreme & bizarre horror, psychological frights and most things in-between. When he’s not reading, he’s writing, and when he’s not writing he’s on Twitter @BensNotWriting. He also reviews books on his Youtube channel, BLURB (https://www.youtube.com/c/blurb1)

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