What do you think?
Rate this book
Deathlands
The world has been overrun by the living dead. Those few who have survived have been divided into two those who seek refuge in a few walled cities, and those who have become nomads, rummaging what they can to survive. Now a conflict is brewing between the two factions, and soldiers who have been sworn to protect the citizens of the walled city of Utopia have been dispatched to rescue the president of the North American Council, whose helicopter crashed in the middle of the zombie-infested areas. But can they survive not only the zombie hordes, but the attacks from the crazed survivors known only as Marauders? Is there any way they can make it back from the deathlands?
178 pages, Paperback
First published September 16, 2007
1 person is currently reading
23 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 5, 2010
Before I begin this review I must apologize. To those who are friends of the author and the author himself. Rob Miller obviously has a love for zombies and zombie stories and wanted to create one himself, which is something I can respect. The picture on the back of the book and the small blurb about him gives me an indication that Rob is probably a really nice guy and so in a way, I hate to have to do this to him.
This book, on many levels, is not good. Unfortunately, on so many levels it is terrible. I will attempt to detail my frustrations with it in a constructive way but in some areas that will be hard to do.
As for the plot, it is fairly simple: a group of soldiers from the new walled city of Utopia, one of the last human outposts in North America, have been sent on a mission to rescue the President, whose helicopter crashed in the Deathlands, where zombies and barbaric humans known as Marauders roam free.
They stumble upon an underground city made up of people who have escaped both the Marauders and the undead and live in relative happiness. Soon foul agents working to deceive the soldiers, Utopian citizens, and the people living in the underground area unleash hell upon earth, causing our main character, Ben, and several other soldiers, to focus their efforts on revenge and redemption. A great deal of human and undead carnage ensues.
Typically with a self published effort I try to take the mis-steps with a grain of salt. There will be editing errors and there will be contextual errors of a rather sizeable quantity. If the story is actually good I do my best to see past them and appreciate that someone who did not want to run through the normal publishing rigamarole came up with some money to put their dream in print. Like another book I have read from PublishAmerica, there was the little caveat before the book started from the publisher stating that the author refused any editing help. In the previous book I read this turned out to be no big deal, as the author made a fairly successful effort at self editing. Not so here.
The book is liberally slathered with gramatical and spelling errors, though I could generally decipher what the author was trying to say. His dialogue was stilted and read like speeches more than conversation. One statement early in the book by one of the characters set the tone: "it matters not". Sounds like Yoda-speak to me. Another quote, which floored me, is one that I cannot accurately describe, so I will post it here, as it was written in the book:
"But we did what we did with the information we had, and we did not have all that we needed. If we had the information then that we have now, I'm sure that we all would have done differently. But we didn't, so we did what we were told like good little soldiers." It sounds a little like 'I know that you know what I know that we both know that you don't know' or something equally as confusingly tongue-twisterish.
While there are plenty of other dialogue and gramatical errors, to be sure, there are other things about this story that are in fact worse. While there is not enough space to list them all, I will take a swipe at some of the odds and ends of this story that bothered me the most.
-A Corporal is in charge over and above a Sergeant, Lieutenant, and Captain.
-At one point the author has two helicopters get right next to each other so that the people in one can jump into the other helicopter before it blows up. Question: how close can two helicopters get with their rotors going before they make contact with each other? Probably not close enough to allow someone to attempt a jump from one to the other I am guessing.
-The underground site is described as a bomb shelter at one point and at another as some sort of Native American hideout, as if the tribes in the United States are spending their free time pre-apocalypse building places like that. Either way, it is this huge, massive underground area and one of the buildings in it is described as such "the building seemed to go on forever into the floor's ceiling." Er, not sure what is meant by a floor's ceiling. Is that anything like a roof's basement?
-There is not much sex in this book but the two brief mentions of it were outright silly. The first describes the woman mounting the man like a wild stallion and in the second scene she actually says "let's consumate our love!" Both descriptions set me to giggling, which I doubt was the author's purpose.
-Every time someone agrees with someone else, they shake their head which was confusing because I am used to a head shake meaning no and a nod meaning yes, but no one seemed to nod in the entire book. It threw me off several times.
-The marauders, those badlands dwellers who haved lived out in the open with the undead for five years, seem to all be idiots, getting killed easier than anyone else by the undead who seem to be able to sneak up on them with ease throughout the story.
-The head bad guy is a cartoon. He actually says at one point: "I am invincible!" and has no real plan to rule the world, just the apparent desire to screw everything up. I guess insanity is the reason but his motivations seemed rather silly, I guess to allow the plot to exist.
-A couple of biological conundrums for me: How does someone get shot through both lungs and is still able to keep on living, fighting, and speaking? How does someone get bitten in the throat and yet still keep talking?
-Overly melodramatic throughout. There are too many instances to reference.
-Two soldiers have to fight each other in a pit and one kills the other. Just to show there is no bad feelings, the one dying gives the other a thumbs up. I somehow doubt that I would be raising my thumb to someone who just killed me. Perhaps another finger, but not my thumb.
There is more, much more, but I will stop there. Well, one more gripe: the ink used in printing this story must have been running short because the text almost looks faded, spotty, cheap.
So why two stars instead of one? Because I have to keep perspective here. I have seen the worst written books in this genre and this story is a notch above them. I believe that if this author were to have sought out professional assistance to edit this book it could have ended up as a much more coherent work. Overall the story flowed from scene to scene, getting us to the conclusion fairly easily. The author may have some potential to write, but I get the sense here that he wrote a rough draft, scanned it, spell checked it for blatant errors, and sent it off to a publishing house. If he went over it with a fine toothed comb and let someone else take a hard look at it, this could have been perhaps a nice little story. Instead it seemed rushed and incomplete.
I wish Rob the best with his next effort and hope he does spend more time in the editing process before he publishes again.
This book, on many levels, is not good. Unfortunately, on so many levels it is terrible. I will attempt to detail my frustrations with it in a constructive way but in some areas that will be hard to do.
As for the plot, it is fairly simple: a group of soldiers from the new walled city of Utopia, one of the last human outposts in North America, have been sent on a mission to rescue the President, whose helicopter crashed in the Deathlands, where zombies and barbaric humans known as Marauders roam free.
They stumble upon an underground city made up of people who have escaped both the Marauders and the undead and live in relative happiness. Soon foul agents working to deceive the soldiers, Utopian citizens, and the people living in the underground area unleash hell upon earth, causing our main character, Ben, and several other soldiers, to focus their efforts on revenge and redemption. A great deal of human and undead carnage ensues.
Typically with a self published effort I try to take the mis-steps with a grain of salt. There will be editing errors and there will be contextual errors of a rather sizeable quantity. If the story is actually good I do my best to see past them and appreciate that someone who did not want to run through the normal publishing rigamarole came up with some money to put their dream in print. Like another book I have read from PublishAmerica, there was the little caveat before the book started from the publisher stating that the author refused any editing help. In the previous book I read this turned out to be no big deal, as the author made a fairly successful effort at self editing. Not so here.
The book is liberally slathered with gramatical and spelling errors, though I could generally decipher what the author was trying to say. His dialogue was stilted and read like speeches more than conversation. One statement early in the book by one of the characters set the tone: "it matters not". Sounds like Yoda-speak to me. Another quote, which floored me, is one that I cannot accurately describe, so I will post it here, as it was written in the book:
"But we did what we did with the information we had, and we did not have all that we needed. If we had the information then that we have now, I'm sure that we all would have done differently. But we didn't, so we did what we were told like good little soldiers." It sounds a little like 'I know that you know what I know that we both know that you don't know' or something equally as confusingly tongue-twisterish.
While there are plenty of other dialogue and gramatical errors, to be sure, there are other things about this story that are in fact worse. While there is not enough space to list them all, I will take a swipe at some of the odds and ends of this story that bothered me the most.
-A Corporal is in charge over and above a Sergeant, Lieutenant, and Captain.
-At one point the author has two helicopters get right next to each other so that the people in one can jump into the other helicopter before it blows up. Question: how close can two helicopters get with their rotors going before they make contact with each other? Probably not close enough to allow someone to attempt a jump from one to the other I am guessing.
-The underground site is described as a bomb shelter at one point and at another as some sort of Native American hideout, as if the tribes in the United States are spending their free time pre-apocalypse building places like that. Either way, it is this huge, massive underground area and one of the buildings in it is described as such "the building seemed to go on forever into the floor's ceiling." Er, not sure what is meant by a floor's ceiling. Is that anything like a roof's basement?
-There is not much sex in this book but the two brief mentions of it were outright silly. The first describes the woman mounting the man like a wild stallion and in the second scene she actually says "let's consumate our love!" Both descriptions set me to giggling, which I doubt was the author's purpose.
-Every time someone agrees with someone else, they shake their head which was confusing because I am used to a head shake meaning no and a nod meaning yes, but no one seemed to nod in the entire book. It threw me off several times.
-The marauders, those badlands dwellers who haved lived out in the open with the undead for five years, seem to all be idiots, getting killed easier than anyone else by the undead who seem to be able to sneak up on them with ease throughout the story.
-The head bad guy is a cartoon. He actually says at one point: "I am invincible!" and has no real plan to rule the world, just the apparent desire to screw everything up. I guess insanity is the reason but his motivations seemed rather silly, I guess to allow the plot to exist.
-A couple of biological conundrums for me: How does someone get shot through both lungs and is still able to keep on living, fighting, and speaking? How does someone get bitten in the throat and yet still keep talking?
-Overly melodramatic throughout. There are too many instances to reference.
-Two soldiers have to fight each other in a pit and one kills the other. Just to show there is no bad feelings, the one dying gives the other a thumbs up. I somehow doubt that I would be raising my thumb to someone who just killed me. Perhaps another finger, but not my thumb.
There is more, much more, but I will stop there. Well, one more gripe: the ink used in printing this story must have been running short because the text almost looks faded, spotty, cheap.
So why two stars instead of one? Because I have to keep perspective here. I have seen the worst written books in this genre and this story is a notch above them. I believe that if this author were to have sought out professional assistance to edit this book it could have ended up as a much more coherent work. Overall the story flowed from scene to scene, getting us to the conclusion fairly easily. The author may have some potential to write, but I get the sense here that he wrote a rough draft, scanned it, spell checked it for blatant errors, and sent it off to a publishing house. If he went over it with a fine toothed comb and let someone else take a hard look at it, this could have been perhaps a nice little story. Instead it seemed rushed and incomplete.
I wish Rob the best with his next effort and hope he does spend more time in the editing process before he publishes again.
Displaying 1 of 1 review