The Phoenix Gene

by Terry Webb

A genetically engineered gene designed to eliminate Alzheimer s disease is accidentally released on a small town in Texas. The gene turns the living into the walking dead. As the number of walking dead increases and spreads across the country, Mac Cullins decides to leave his home in the small Texas town where the outbreak starts and travel to his son s home in Alabama. Along the way he must fight off the zombies that roam the countryside and raiders that will take whatever they want from anyone they find still alive. Can Mac make it to his son s home? Is his son still alive?

Genres: Zombies

217 pages, Paperback

First published May 14, 2007

Reviews

[Brandon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow! What can I say about this "masterpiece?" When I was in fifth grade I used to write horror stories. They had entertaining premises, but were not what you would call well written. This book makes my elementary school prose sound like Shakespeare. Characters are so underdeveloped that Mr. Webb only bothers to give a handful of them names. Sentences feel like they are fired at you point-blank from a shotgun. They are abrupt and scattered. The tense can change mid-sentence and then change back by the end. The same word can be used three times in the same sentence! Not to mention all of the horrendously obvious typos. I don't think anyone else has ever proofread this book. I described this book to my wife as if the author wrote one book, printed it three times, fed the three of them in a wood chipper, collected the resulting pieces and randomly taped them back together. I soldiered through this to the end only because I have a masochistic love for amazingly bad movies and books. If you enjoy torturing your brain with crap, give this one a try, if not, avoid this one like a plague of zombies.

[Patrick D'Orazio · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Phoenix Gene is a self published zombie novel that tells the story of the rapid spread of a virus that started out as a genetic research project that would hopefully help cure Alzheimer's by reigniting the spark of life in dead brain cells. It escapes the lab and quickly spreads across Texas and then the entire U.S., infecting virually everyone by reanimating their dead bodies after initially killing them.
I have read several self published zombie novels and this work shares similar traits with many of them: it was not professionally edited and thus it is crammed full of spelling, grammar, and contextual errors galore. It is my hope that this author spends the time having someone else take a thorough look at his next book before he decides to get it published through Publish America or another company that allows you to produce your own books.
I will say that I like the author's description of how the virus spread and how he detailed its conquest of the United States day after day. Unfortunately, I found even his descriptions to be lacking or hard to swallow in many ways.
My major criticisms (and I am trying to be constructive here) of this work are:
-The book reads more like an outline than an actual story. Every sentence full of facts but with very little emotion. It was extremely hard to get invested in the story as we jumped from person to person and experience to experience.
-The dialogue was stilted, limited. When a man who had been trying to get a hold of his son on a cell phone finally does after experiencing several zombie terrors the conversation was almost robotic, lacking in any sort of emotion or change in tempo.
-While I did like how the author describes how the virus spreads, some of his logic with the military escaped me (trying to retake an entire city with 4 groups of flamethrowers/rifle squads as the major military effort sanctioned by the President struck me as a rather minor effort).
-We move from person to person, group to group, often without anything more than a new paragraph to inform us that we are now on to another setting entirely. It was confusing and though most people the author introduces us to are killed quickly and thus do not require us to remember them there definitely needed to be a much better effort to clearly separate each new encounter so the reader can more easily keep track of things.
-Occasionally the author would jump to present tense for a sentence or two here or there, with no rhyme or reason.
-The author repeats himself on several occasions: "attacks were now being reported in all 50 states" was mentioned on at least three seperate occasions as an example.
-The author had a tendency to tell us something that happened and then afterwards bring a character in to wonder what happened when the arrive upon the scene. It was needlessly repetitive. If we already know what happened we don't need another paragraph where a character speculates on what happened. The mystery is already gone so who cares?

I honestly can say that this story did not scare me at all. There is absolutely no tension build up, no suspense. We are told about a zombie coming or a zombie scratching or biting someone, but there is practically no surprises. It all rolls out quite matter-of-factly and people are killed quickly and with little to no drama. Again, it is as if we are getting the Action News version of the story instead of actually being there, feeling the terror the characters might feel, the tension and the agony at what is going on around them and to them.

I am a person who loves zombie fiction so I am a biased reader. I am willing to read a book that I know was self published and has negative reviews like this one because I still want to gain insights into what the author has come up with. So I am sucker for this and was willing to cough up the dough for this book even though I knew it was probably going to be extremely rough around the edges.

The author will hopefully hone his writing skills, submit his future writings to an editor, and learn how to draw an audience in more and make them feel a closer attachment to his characters. If he can do that then perhaps his next book will be one that I will be able to recommend, but I cannot do so with this, his first novel. I do wish him the best of luck with his ongoing efforts.

[Psy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bloody awful (& not in a good way !)
Unfortunately it's so badly written that it's impossible to settle into the rhythm of the story. So my advice is don't.