Saturday, September 15, 2012

The Infects by Sean Beaudoin

Title: The Infects
Author: Sean Beaudoin
Publication Date: September 25, 2012
Length: 384 pages

The Infects is a zombie novel, but not your typical zombie novel. (Actually, I haven't read a lot of zombie novels, so maybe I'm not the right person to judge that.) What I think is atypical is that the people who are trying to escape the zombies in this book are aware of the whole zombie culture, so they quote rules, and talk about zombie movies, and compare them to what they see happening.

Nick is sentenced to a summer camp called Inward Trek, which is a camp for juvenile delinquents, after an unfortunate incident in the slaughterhouse where he worked. He's given the camp name Nero. As if the camp itself wasn't bad enough, they wake up the first morning to find that the counsellors have gone crazy and started eating several other campers. The ones who survive flee into the woods, and the rest of the story follows them as they run away from zombies, look for the girls who they hope have survived over in the girls' camp, and try to figure out what they're going to do and where they're going to go.

At first I found the characters hard to keep track of. They were all sort of introduced and described at once, and then never again. At the end of the book you can read the police reports for each of them, and I found that I was picturing several of them completely wrong. But once a few of them had died, they became easier to keep track of, and some of them were quite entertaining.

The ending really made it all worthwhile to me, even if it was rather weird. It was also just so delightful. That's all I can really say while keeping this spoiler-free. :)

Also, am I the only one who finds it really weird to see super-modern references in books? Maybe I'm just used to reading books that are slightly older? Every time I see Facebook or Occupy Wall Street mentioned in a novel, it's a slight shock. Maybe I'm just weird that way.

3 stars. I actually feel kind of bad about this rating, because I feel like maybe I would have liked it more as a paperback. The ebook I got through NetGalley was so horribly formatted that I'm sure it negatively affected my reading experience. It's tough to read a book when all the important words have several letters missing.

Full disclosure: Free e-book copy received from the publisher through NetGalley.

2 comments:

  1. To bad. Formatting is important and is taken for granted. I agree that marks come off when I'm distracted by anything.

    I think you were more than fair. :-)

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    1. Yeah, I mean when an ebook is formatted so poorly that it actually becomes difficult to read, it makes it really hard to enjoy the book! So you'd think publishers would put a little bit more effort into that.

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