REVIEWED: ZOMBIES AND SHIT BY CARLTON MELLICK III
ZOMBIES AND SHIT by Carlton Mellick III (2010 Deadite Press / 233 pp / tp and eBook)
Twenty people wake up in unfamiliar surroundings. It turns out they’ve been abducted/chosen (depending how you look at it) to appear on a reality TV show called Zombie Survival, a brutal contest that’s the top rated show in a futuristic world overrun by the living dead. An Asian woman explains their predicament: they have three days to cross the Red Zone, a decayed city where zombies and robotic dogs stand in the way of a helicopter…a helicopter that will take only one person to safety. And while alliances are formed, each contestant knows this is to-the-death scenario.
The contestants have all come from a surviving city’s poorest Quadrant: in Mellick’s grim post-apocalyptic world, classes live in separated areas, but only those in the exclusive Platinum Quadrant have the benefit of television, where Zombie Survival is the top rated program.
While ZOMBIES AND SHIT is packed to the brim with off-the-wall violence, interesting weapons, action, and zombie attacks, it’s the contestants (many of them street punks) and their quirks/abilities that make this novel so much fun to read.
One thing I enjoy about Mellick’s story telling is I seriously doubt he could ever write a 100% “normal” horror novel…and that’s a compliment. He infuses just the right amount of his trademark weirdness to give ZOMBIES AND SHIT a different flavor than your typical end-of-the-world undead epic, my favorite being a black character named Laurence who turns out to be a cyborg version of a popular 1980s TV star.
A blend of the seldom-seen 1986 film DEAD END DRIVE-IN and BATTLE ROYALE, Mellick’s “thank you letter to the zombie genre” is a real wild ride that you don’t have to be a zombie fan to enjoy.
(Note: while ZOMBIES AND SHIT is a true, fresh spin on the subgenre, one grossly underrated novel took an amazing look at reality shows and zombies a few years earlier: check out Jason R. Hornsby’s EVERY SIGH, THE END (2006) if you enjoy Mellick’s novel).\
- Nick Cato
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