Book Review: Monster Nation

I finished Monster Nation over the weekend. I liked it a lot, though not quite as much as Monster Island. It's one of those sequels which can stand on its own, but is definitely more satisfying if the reader has already read the first book.

Monster Nation tells us how the epidemic that eventually engulfs the world began. There are a few main characters, on both sides of the dead/undead divide, who we follow as the epidemic spreads and the nation slowly but surely falls to the rampaging zombie horde. David Wellington has a knack for crafting characters who are all imperfect, and entirely justified in all of their actions. Even the zombies, who are out there clawing through the brains of every living thing they can find, rarely come off as purely evil. I mean, zombies gotta eat, right? When someone is actually going to be evil, though, he doesn't pull any punches, and gives us great villains that are just as compelling as our heroes. He also does a fantastic job of giving each character a very clear voice and personality, so we feel like we're actually watching real people in real places, instead of listening to an author talk at us for a few hundred pages.

It's ambitious, to tell a story that moves people from California to Colorado to Washington and back, but he really pulls it off. I thought it hit all the right notes without being too graphic and gory, and was very well-paced. Just like Monster Island, Monster Nation brought some new ideas and mythology to a genre that should have run out of original ideas a long time ago.

I give it four rotting corpses out of five, and can't wait for Monster Planet to come out.

Comments

[m_faust]

Read Monster Island and I have to admit that I was a little bit disappointed. For world-wide zombie upheaval I don't think that it can hold a candle to World War Z, which I considered a good book, not just a good zombie book.

[Matthew J. Sanderson]

Hey, Wil. Sorry to leave a comment that's more than a little off-topic, but I'm pretty sure you'll want to see this:

http://lolbots.com/?p=407

There's a lot more loltreks on there, but this one... Well, you'll see.

[happicat]

That sounds almost exactly like The Stand, but with the dead people still walking around. *ponders*

[Wil]

Then I've done a terrible job reviewing it, happicat. It's nothing at all like The Stand.

[candy floss]

Have you read "World War Z" by Max Brooks? An excellent zombie novel, told as an oral history by the survivors of the zombie wars.

[clever_ruse]

Monster Nation was a pretty good book, but I agree with those who said that World War Z was better. Maybe it's because I read WWZ first, but Monster Nation seemed like kind of a rip-off.

[Tempter Of Fate]

Thanks for the suggestion, Wil. I will have to make a point to check out both Monster Island and Monster Nation (in sequence of course).

If you've read World War Z (another on my list of must reads now), be sure to check out the Zombie Survival Guide also by Max Brooks. It gets a little dry in a few places, but generically a fun read.

[Bender4Pharoah]

Monster Planet was great, but not like the first two books. The first two books were more "street level".

[Bender4Pharoah]

Why wait for print? Here's the entire Monster Planet book free online:
http://www.brokentype.com/planet/

You can read the whole series while at work without your boss knowing. The Burgess Meredith character from Twilight Zone would have loved the 21st century!

[Anna]

Oh, how cool! I'm really glad you liked the book. I'm just going to link to this from Snowbooks' (the book's publisher in the UK) blog, if you don't mind. Do you think maybe, possibly there would be any chance you'd want us to print a quote from you (either pulled from your review or specially crafted) on our edition of Monster Nation?

Hope you enjoy 'Planet as well!