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Pallid Light: The Waking Dead
Expanding the boundaries of survival fiction, this captivating story opens with the end of the world—thundering storms strike across the planet, searing the earth and leaving swathes of destruction and few survivors. For residents of Temperance, Illinois, however, the nightmare is just beginning. When the sky roils in luminous colors, the people of the small town begin to die; ex-con Randall Kane takes this as his cue to leave. What he didn't expect was for the dead to come back to life or to be so confused about what defines human versus inhuman behavior in this new world order.
304 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2008
About the author
William Jones
28 books53 followersWilliam Jones has received Bram Stoker Award nominations, International Horror Guild Award and Origins Award nominations for his works. He is the editor of several anthologies, including The Anthology of Dark Wisdom: The Best of Dark Fiction, Frontier Cthulhu: Ancient Horrors in the New World, High Seas Cthulhu, and the Horrors Beyond Series. His book, The Strange Cases of Rudolph Pearson was selected by Editor Ellen Datlow as a "seminal" work for readers of Lovecraftian horror. He has also written a number of role-playing game supplements, and his writings have been translated into several languages. He was worked as an engineer and a professor of English literature. He writes full time now, and lives in Michigan.
--from the author's website
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
--from the author's website
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 18, 2010
I'd been wanting to read a good zombie book and this one filled the bill. I'd classify it as "action horror," with a thriller element but with the kind of true horror that only someone who really reads and understands the genre can create. Jones did a very fine job at combining zombie elements from the various movies and books with his own intersting twists.
The reason for the zombie outbreak is also interesting, and quite a bit more creative than your average story. I can definitely recommend it for those of you who like action and graphic horror mixed together.
The reason for the zombie outbreak is also interesting, and quite a bit more creative than your average story. I can definitely recommend it for those of you who like action and graphic horror mixed together.
March 8, 2011
William Jones, Pallid Light: The Walking Dead (Elder Signs Press, 2009)
My first thought upon finishing this book was “I wonder if that subtitle was put there by Jones or by Elder Signs Press”. It just doesn't fit. It's grammatically awkward, and while there are zombies in the book, they are more plot device around the characters than they are main attraction (think Robert Kirkman more than, say, Greg Solis). Because of this, I wonder if some of this book's readers are going to be disappointed that there isn't more zombie action. That said, I was not one of those readers. I've had some bad runs with micropress novels recently, and Pallid Light was quite a welcome change; it throws a few interesting twists into the origins hypothesis, it gives us solid characters and realistic (within the frame of Jones' world-building) action, and it comes to a satisfying climax. Tell me again why Ben Tripp is publishing on a major label while William Jones is on a micropress who can't get books into libraries to save their lives?
Plot: Rand Clay is an ex-con who's moved to the small town of Temperance, Illinois, in search of a fresh start. The town won't let him have one, though; he'll always be “the murderer living out at the old boardinghouse.” He's got one friend in town, the lovely if slightly cracked Cada, but everyone else looks at him as if he's going to start shooting up the general store at any minute. Cada lives in the next apartment over, so when the world goes insane, it's pretty easy for them to get together. And the world does go insane. A country-wide, possibly global, electrical storm, coupled with strange lights in the sky, knocks out the town's electricity, floods most of its streets, and causes the dead to get up and start walking. Oh, those silly dead folks. Rand and Cada, helped by a recently-deceased neighbor's car, decide to high-tail it out of town, but they keep getting distracted by such things as the need for supplies, the discovery of other survivors (not all of whom wish them well), etc.
Jones starts throwing twists at you almost form the get-go, which serves to keep things interesting while staying within a stable convention (the biggest twist is that zombism is not transferred via bite, which server to amp up the action at the cost of horror; this is much more an action novel than a horror novel anyway). The characterization is solid, though given the variations on the theme, I wish Rand had been a little less conventional than he is; he's your typical bad-boy-makes-good hero. Cada is a much more interesting character, and shows what Jones is capable of, and Rand's reactions to her are the strongest part of his make-up. The minor characters are, for the most part, just right; enough individuality to make them easily-distinguishable without going into their entire life history (as, say, Stephen King often does).
Looking for a good old-fashioned action book that just happens to include zombies? You could do a lot worse (and trust me, I have) than Pallid Light. *** ½
My first thought upon finishing this book was “I wonder if that subtitle was put there by Jones or by Elder Signs Press”. It just doesn't fit. It's grammatically awkward, and while there are zombies in the book, they are more plot device around the characters than they are main attraction (think Robert Kirkman more than, say, Greg Solis). Because of this, I wonder if some of this book's readers are going to be disappointed that there isn't more zombie action. That said, I was not one of those readers. I've had some bad runs with micropress novels recently, and Pallid Light was quite a welcome change; it throws a few interesting twists into the origins hypothesis, it gives us solid characters and realistic (within the frame of Jones' world-building) action, and it comes to a satisfying climax. Tell me again why Ben Tripp is publishing on a major label while William Jones is on a micropress who can't get books into libraries to save their lives?
Plot: Rand Clay is an ex-con who's moved to the small town of Temperance, Illinois, in search of a fresh start. The town won't let him have one, though; he'll always be “the murderer living out at the old boardinghouse.” He's got one friend in town, the lovely if slightly cracked Cada, but everyone else looks at him as if he's going to start shooting up the general store at any minute. Cada lives in the next apartment over, so when the world goes insane, it's pretty easy for them to get together. And the world does go insane. A country-wide, possibly global, electrical storm, coupled with strange lights in the sky, knocks out the town's electricity, floods most of its streets, and causes the dead to get up and start walking. Oh, those silly dead folks. Rand and Cada, helped by a recently-deceased neighbor's car, decide to high-tail it out of town, but they keep getting distracted by such things as the need for supplies, the discovery of other survivors (not all of whom wish them well), etc.
Jones starts throwing twists at you almost form the get-go, which serves to keep things interesting while staying within a stable convention (the biggest twist is that zombism is not transferred via bite, which server to amp up the action at the cost of horror; this is much more an action novel than a horror novel anyway). The characterization is solid, though given the variations on the theme, I wish Rand had been a little less conventional than he is; he's your typical bad-boy-makes-good hero. Cada is a much more interesting character, and shows what Jones is capable of, and Rand's reactions to her are the strongest part of his make-up. The minor characters are, for the most part, just right; enough individuality to make them easily-distinguishable without going into their entire life history (as, say, Stephen King often does).
Looking for a good old-fashioned action book that just happens to include zombies? You could do a lot worse (and trust me, I have) than Pallid Light. *** ½
January 20, 2011
If you didn't know already there's a game you can play with the cover of a lot of these zombie novels about nowadays. I've named it 'Guess the Celebrity Zombie' and it involves who the zombies on the cover may, or may not, be based upon. In the case of Pallid Light I see Ben Kingsley as the main male zombie and Tina Fey as the lead female. Over the shoulder of Tina as we look at the cover there's Shirley Temple and Christina Ricci to the right of her. Surprisingly Ice-Man of the X-Men makes an appearance just to the left of Ricci and Napoleon Dynamite is to the left of him. In between Kingsley and Fey we have WWE superstar Edge and to the left of Kingsley we have...okay couldn't come up with a likeness for her but feel free to name her yourself.
Getting past the cover and onto the novel itself the story takes place in a small town named Temperance where on a rainy night the dead begin rising from their graves. Always small towns. If we just cremated everyone we would never have these zombie problems so think of that option for yourself less you arise one day as one of the undead!
The story starts off quite well with the hero being an anti-hero, if that makes sense, and it had me turning the pages quicker than I had anticipated. Unfortunately the good start begins to drag by the time the first third of the book is done and from there on in it became a bit of a chore to get through. In fact the only piece of story that dragged me from my boredom occurred at the beginning of chapter 11 when I got an unintentional laugh;
"Cada tugged off Paul's slicker..."
Ha! Lucky man! Upon a re-read I figured out his slicker is actually his raincoat or poncho or something akin to one of those.
Other than the silly innuendo there was nothing else in the novel to put a smile on my face. The problem for me was that the story never really evolved and it was a case of the same, sprinkled from time to time with a few different, characters reliving the same type of situations just in different places around Temperance. Add in a plethora of spelling errors and the enjoyment level wasn't particularly high. The ending is also weak and is left open with no conclusion and no explanations for some of the mysteries presented throughout the novel (for instance, why was Jimmy rounding everyone up?). In fact, near the very end the main character Randall Clay, whose name kept reminding me of Randall Flagg from Steven King's 'The Stand' (an ode to one of the author's favorite characters perhaps), puts a gun under his chin and contemplates pulling the trigger and I couldn't help but sympathize as after trawling through this novel I felt like doing the same.
Getting past the cover and onto the novel itself the story takes place in a small town named Temperance where on a rainy night the dead begin rising from their graves. Always small towns. If we just cremated everyone we would never have these zombie problems so think of that option for yourself less you arise one day as one of the undead!
The story starts off quite well with the hero being an anti-hero, if that makes sense, and it had me turning the pages quicker than I had anticipated. Unfortunately the good start begins to drag by the time the first third of the book is done and from there on in it became a bit of a chore to get through. In fact the only piece of story that dragged me from my boredom occurred at the beginning of chapter 11 when I got an unintentional laugh;
"Cada tugged off Paul's slicker..."
Ha! Lucky man! Upon a re-read I figured out his slicker is actually his raincoat or poncho or something akin to one of those.
Other than the silly innuendo there was nothing else in the novel to put a smile on my face. The problem for me was that the story never really evolved and it was a case of the same, sprinkled from time to time with a few different, characters reliving the same type of situations just in different places around Temperance. Add in a plethora of spelling errors and the enjoyment level wasn't particularly high. The ending is also weak and is left open with no conclusion and no explanations for some of the mysteries presented throughout the novel (for instance, why was Jimmy rounding everyone up?). In fact, near the very end the main character Randall Clay, whose name kept reminding me of Randall Flagg from Steven King's 'The Stand' (an ode to one of the author's favorite characters perhaps), puts a gun under his chin and contemplates pulling the trigger and I couldn't help but sympathize as after trawling through this novel I felt like doing the same.
August 13, 2016
I really liked the concept behind Rand, a hardened character, out of jail after having served 10 years for murder, who firmly believes there's no such thing as an ex-con. Some people just have that darkness to them, and even when they're not acting on it, it's part of who they are. I found myself wishing, though, that Jones had taken this even further. Admittedly, it's difficult to find a balance between a dark and selfish hero and one who's likeable (or at least relatable). I felt, though, that while Rand spoke a lot about being a hard dude who wouldn't blink at death and being better off without the other survivors to hold him back, he spent an awful lot of time being sentimental. At one point, he even regrets the death of a guy who just a couple of pages earlier he strongly disliked, which lead to me going "wait, what?" I suppose Rand's telling us he's a big tough guy without entirely backing that up could be a case of unreliable narrator, but while I'm often a fan of that sort of thing, I really would have liked to see a more dramatic contrast between Rand and the rest of the characters.
The biggest question, of course, is what makes Pallid Light stand out from every other zombie novel out there? Well, given recent trends, it seems worthy to mention that no classic literary figures or their authors make an appearance, but more than that, the book attempts to put a little sci-fi in with the horror. The zombies are not some random paranormal occurrence, and they're not caused by some contagious virus. I'm not going to give out the reason behind the end of the world, since it's rather spoileriffic, but I don't believe I've ever heard that reasoning behind zombies before, nor have I seen that particular brand of melding between sci-fi and horror.
That being said, the book is very much dominated by the horror aspects of the book, the post-apocalyptic man-against-the-world story. It's gory and never allows the protagonists to rest for more than a few minutes before their luck falls out yet again, so if you're looking for just that kind of a story, well, follow the bloody trail.
The biggest question, of course, is what makes Pallid Light stand out from every other zombie novel out there? Well, given recent trends, it seems worthy to mention that no classic literary figures or their authors make an appearance, but more than that, the book attempts to put a little sci-fi in with the horror. The zombies are not some random paranormal occurrence, and they're not caused by some contagious virus. I'm not going to give out the reason behind the end of the world, since it's rather spoileriffic, but I don't believe I've ever heard that reasoning behind zombies before, nor have I seen that particular brand of melding between sci-fi and horror.
That being said, the book is very much dominated by the horror aspects of the book, the post-apocalyptic man-against-the-world story. It's gory and never allows the protagonists to rest for more than a few minutes before their luck falls out yet again, so if you're looking for just that kind of a story, well, follow the bloody trail.
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August 4, 2011
The world ends at the flick of a switch and in Temperance Illinois the nightmare is just beginning...
Well the nightmare did happen and I must admit I thoroughly enjoyed Pallid Light. This book is extremely well written (something we should expect given Williams previous work). Characters that are well drawn and that you get to know well, but as with all post-apocalyptic novels don't get too attached, the body count is extremely high. William manages to capture the atmospheric feeling of being trapped in a town full of the walking dead, well the feeling that I suspect you would feel in that situation not having experienced it myself just yet.
The story moves at a cracking pace from page 1 and doesn't let you catch your breath until you put the book down at the end.
So if you like your books full of creepy scenes, the dead eating people, a fight for survival and fire, (have to have fire in a book about the walking dead) then Pallid Light: The Walking Dead is definitely a book for you.
Well the nightmare did happen and I must admit I thoroughly enjoyed Pallid Light. This book is extremely well written (something we should expect given Williams previous work). Characters that are well drawn and that you get to know well, but as with all post-apocalyptic novels don't get too attached, the body count is extremely high. William manages to capture the atmospheric feeling of being trapped in a town full of the walking dead, well the feeling that I suspect you would feel in that situation not having experienced it myself just yet.
The story moves at a cracking pace from page 1 and doesn't let you catch your breath until you put the book down at the end.
So if you like your books full of creepy scenes, the dead eating people, a fight for survival and fire, (have to have fire in a book about the walking dead) then Pallid Light: The Walking Dead is definitely a book for you.
May 14, 2010
This wasn't a perfect book...the pacing lagged at times and there were numerous spelling errors but the character development and original concept of the zombies themselves kept me interested. I even shed a tear at the end...that doesn't happen to often in a zombie novel!
April 8, 2010
This book is great
I loved the zombies
I think there was a little bit to much "Fuck" saying
I loved the zombies
I think there was a little bit to much "Fuck" saying
June 11, 2010
I enjoyed this zombie novel right up until the end.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews