Rapture

Survivor Chronicles #1

by Mike Sutton

The dead walk the earth feeding on the living. One of humanity's deepest fears. Civilization has collapsed, leaving scattered pockets of survivors to fend for themselves. In the midst of the plague of walking dead, humanity turns on itself.

Humanity panics and attempts to scatter in every direction, forcing the government to call up Ash and his platoon of Army reservists in a vain attempt to try and enforce the quarantine of Jefferson City.

As civilization Jesus takes his family and joins the exodus, fleeing into the countryside to whatever safe harbour he might find. While Jason and his friends search for a strongpoint to hole up in.

First book in the series. 149,000 words.

Genres: Horror, Zombies

300 pages, ebook

First published April 27, 2010

About the author

Mike Sutton. Not to be confused with Mike Sutton. Or Either Mike Sutton or, last but not least, Mike Sutton. This particular carrier of that name was born in the upper Midwest where he now resides, watching MST3K and wondering how long he would survive in the zombie apocalypse. Not too long most likely, as he is rather prone to poor life decisions.

Reviews

[J.R. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rapture is an interesting foray for Mr. Sutton into the zombie/undead/horror/apocalyptic genre. The storyline revolves around several different characters ranging from a couple of comic book fanboys to a Hispanic family, a drunken vagrant and a National Guard unit. The reader follows along as each of these groups encounter zombies and in some cases, each other with mostly adverse results. Most of the action is focused on the Guard unit and the fanboys. Taking a page out of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, one group takes shelter in a ‘Megamart’ similar to the survivors in Romero’s film, who take shelter in a large mall. The National Guard unit turns out to be commanded by a captain that would make Brando’s Colonel Kurtz look like a humanitarian. While both these instances border on cliché, Sutton makes it work, sort of.

While the story has plenty of action, suspense and horror, it does suffer from a serious formatting issue where the previous chapters run into the next chapter with no warning as in no spacing between creating a run-on problem. Along with this problem are spelling, grammatical, accuracy and research issues. What I found to be slightly confusing were the references to hippies, Vietnam, the older OD green uniforms that the Guard had, their use of the M16 rifle then toss in some references to contemporary pop culture like Bruce Campbell and Army of Darkness. This is an era/setting issue that could be resolved by some minor rewrites or editing.

Example of this can be seen when the Guard unit encounters a group in a Tan Ford truck which later morphs into a Jeep and the occupants are referred to as hippies and use the classic 70’s terminology by calling the soldiers ‘fascist pigs’. Previous to that, there was a description of the Guard’s weapons referencing the old M60s as ones that had seen action during Vietnam. This reference falls back to a lack of research. What I mean is that while it is technically true that the National Guard was normally given hand me downs from Big Army, they would not still be using M60 machine guns that had seen action in Vietnam or be wearing the old and now retired, OD green ‘fatigues’. It’s possibly that the unit might have some older M16A2s in their inventory but not too likely as most Guard units have been deployed to SWA (re: the Middle East) in the last 10 years and all of them should now have the M4 which started replacing the M16 in 1994.

Again, research, when you use real-world items in a fictional story, at least try to be accurate.

When the group that contains the fanboys hits a gun store they grab semi-automatic M16s, these would in reality be AR15s the semi-automatic only version of the M16 as the M16 is a selective fire weapon specifically reserved for military and police use. Therefore, AR15 would be more accurate in this instance, see research again.

In a later sequence in the story, a National Guard corporal pulls his 9mm which as described, replaced the .50 caliber Desert Eagle that the military used to issue. I scratch my head at this one with a big WTF? At no time has any branch of the US Military ever issued the .50 IMI Desert Eagle handgun. They have replaced the 1911 .45, ‘old slabsides’ with the Beretta 92FS which is designated the M9.

This directly relates back to research, accuracy and those pesky little things called details.

[Amber Carson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading this book and then life caught up with me and didn't allow me much reading time so it took me longer than usual to finish this book but the time it took me to read in no way reflects on the story because I thoroughly enjoyed this book! Zombie novels are my favorite reads and a guilty pleasure of mine. Some people like to curl up at night and relax with a good romance novel, but not me, I like to curl up with a good zombie novel & Rapture did not disappoint me! when I was reading Rapture I did not feel like I had a sense of Deja vu like i do when I read some other Zombie books, Rapture felt unique to me. At first I did not like they way it skipped between characters but I got over that quickly and now i feel like had the story been written different or just from one persons point of view it would not have been as good. in this story the Zombie were not the only thing the survivors had to watch out for, they had to watch out for other survivors who became barbaric and pillaged, rapped, and killed. The story ended well setting up for a sequel. The only problem I had with this book was constant typos and mis-spelled words It did not bother me enough to take away any stars but it could be distracting for some people. I gave this 4 out of 5 stars and highly recommend! I already bought the sequel "Ploughshares Into Swords"

[Noah B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book. It took me a while to get used to several main characters, but once I did it flowed nicely. I would say more but I don't know how without spoilers. I will say this Mr. Sutton likes to throw curve balls. Lol I will definitely recommended this series to all of my friends.

[Brandy Hunt · Rating 2 out of 5]

While this novel has a great story and some interesting characters, I will not be reading the rest of this series anytime soon. In all, take away the formatting errors, and this would be a solid three stars.

Once you get used to the shift points of view between the different parties of survivors, the story starts to become interesting (this took me almost exactly halfway through the book). However, the grammatical and formatting errors were impossible to ignore, and in some cases, so jaring to the pacing to the novel I almost didn't finish.

The formatting errors impacted both punctuation and a main character's name. I won't speak to the grammatical errors because I'm having the same trouble in something I'm re-editing. However, there was some over use of the spellcheck function that made a few parts of the novel very hard to read.

[Faye · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really liked this version of a zombie apocalypse story. Different way of saying a story with varying chapters from different people, you seem to get a wider picture of the End of Times. Will definitely get the sequels!