The Rooster

Surviving with Style #1

by Richard Peters

Cannibals, crazies, zombies- call ‘em whatever you like, but we’re overrun with them. I spent months keeping a low profile and scratching out a decent living among the ruins until my luck ran out. It didn’t seem that way at first, when The Boss and her all-female gang “rescued me.” But I learned quickly being the only rooster in a henhouse makes for a better fantasy than a way of life.
Especially when the zombies are getting smarter…
and organized.

49 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 14, 2014

About the author

Richard Peters is the author of the Operation Enduring Unity series. He served from 2002-2007 as an artillery spotter in the US Army. Richard spent 27 months in two tours bringing peace at any price to the post-apocalyptic streets and mahalla’s of Baghdad.
He currently lives with his wife and son in Germany and runs his own technical services business.

Reviews

[A. Bowdoin Van Riper · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is not a book for those bothered by gratuitous sex and violence; it consists, by design, of very little else. Our Hero, one of the survivors of a lightly sketched zombie apocalypse, is rescued from a particularly tight spot by members of an all-female community of survivors and brought to their fortified compound for safe-keeping. He has the only set of functioning male sex organs, and the only un-zombified Y chromosomes, in the neighborhood, making him as prized as a pure-bred rooster (hence the title) on a chicken farm.

Author Richard Peters, to his credit, includes scenes of Our Hero realizing that being the lone man in an all-female community may not be the horny-guy-fantasy-come-true that it seems to be. At the end of the day, though, this is not a story about gender-role reversal or a Heinlein-esque satire of present-day sexual hang-ups. The plot acts like the batter in a high-quality fruitcake: Its function is to glue together the bits that you bought the product for in the first place.

The scenes of mayhem and carnage in The Rooster play as briskly and efficiently as the on-screen combat in a “first-person-shooter” video game. Unfortunately, the sex scenes play the same way. The Rooster comes on like the creative offspring of ménage-a-trois between a pulp science-fiction novel, a “women-in-prison” exploitation film, and a copy of Penthouse Letters magazine, but it doesn’t have the courage of its raunchy convictions. Peters fills the pages with bondage, sadism, voyeurism, domination, sexual slavery, and (implied) lesbianism—not to mention straightforward heterosexual lust—but his clinically detached voice leeches out all trace of titillation (let alone eroticism). “Your mileage may vary,” however, and in the case of this low-priced novella it will cost you very little—in time or money—to find out whether yours, in fact, does.

[Robert Zimmermann · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Rooster was a quick, enjoyable read. It’s part zombie story and part erotica, though it’s not so heavy in either.

The premise is interesting. A man is a prison/sex slave for a compound of women who’ve banded together to survived in the world after a zombie apocalypse. It’s a good backdrop for a character to get into a situation like this. The militant group of women hold him basically with the threat that if he doesn’t comply, he’ll be thrown back into the zombie infested world he came from.

As I said, this story wasn’t too heavy on certain aspects. Even though it’s short (roughly 16k words), I think it could have been bulked up with some more story development and had less glossed over as the story moved forward in time. It also seems to be the first in a series, so I know not everything will be built up in the first installment. I just felt that it could have used some more to link it into another story than the zombies evolving (hinted at in the description). Not much time was spent in The Rooster on this, but I think it’s what’ll be explored more in whatever comes next.

Overall a good story, some room to get better in the next story and hopefully expand into a more developed story as a whole. I’ll be keeping an eye out for that from Peters.

[Sarah Smith]

It is a short story about a survivors in post apocalyptic south Texas. The main character John Randell is kidnapped by 5 commandos while out on a foraging party. He comes to find out that camp yea has been sent to is ran by all women. I love the idea that this camp is run by women has all of the amenities, while the men's camps are living like cave people. The women essentially rape men to get pregnant, they really have no other need for them. However, the upper command has no idea that a rebellion is brewing. This was a surprisingly good novel, there was an actual story line and not just sex scenes. It was interesting to have the women be the aggressors, as in most romance novels, rape isn't really rape which I think is horrendously misleading, but I don't have a soap box about it either. I was surprised that when I got to the end I felt it was too short of a story and I wanted to read more and find out what happens with the rebellion. Peters has good writing, very easy flow.

For a full review see my blog http://www.adventuresofabibliophile.b...