4 out of 5 stars
I have been a zombie fan ever since I saw the “Night of the Living Dead” back when I was just a kid. You know, the old one, the original black and white. How could I resist when the author approached and asked if I’d be interested in reading this novel? Simple answer—I couldn’t.
This is one of those occasional novels you pick up where you are basically set up for one of two reactions. You either love it for its quirky fun… or completely hate it. There isn’t much room for the in between views. It’s definitely one of those that won’t be for everyone. For those of you who might be a fan of Edward Lee, trust me, you’ll love it. There are definitely a lot of gross details, and a lot of sex—not exactly what one imagines when picking up a novel titled “Vegan Zombie Apocalypse”. But no matter which side you end up falling toward, you gotta love the imagination that sits behind this story.
Welcome to zombie-land, where the zombies are vegetarian, but not just your old garden variety type flesh eaters (oh, wait, it is that kind, the garden variety part!). These zombies are veggie types. They eat blood potatoes. And where do they get these yummy sounding things? They grow them on people, of course, or better known in zombie-land as humancows. Humans are caught, the blood potatoes planted in their muscle, and then they are tended for the next five years on vegfarms until they are ripe for harvesting. Unfortunately, humancows don’t make it through the harvesting part, they go to the butcher, their bodies roasted and fed to the many humancows still planted and growing.
This is only one part of the quirky tale. We follow a humancow named Soil15. She is a little different from the other humancows, not quite as docile or locked into accepting her fate as living fertilizer. Eventually she finds a way to escape, which sets us on course for a whole lot of out-of-there experiences, including climbing a lemon tree, grown much like Jack’s magic beans, in Jack and the Beanstalk. This tree grows up to a zombie type heaven where…
And that’s all I’m going to tell you because no one would believe me anyway. It’s a fun story with a guaranteed part or two just waiting to gross you out. It brought out more than a couple of “ewwwws!” from me, let me tell you. But I still couldn’t put it down. As I said at the start, the author, Wol-vriey, has a great imagination and I’ll look forward to reading more from him in the near future. Enjoy.
Denna Holm 