Great Review of LSOZI
Trashcanman, a Top Reviewer on Amazon.com posted the following review of the paperback version of Last
Stand on Zombie Island today.
Just waiting for that ball to drop..., November 5, 2012
By trashcanman (Hanford, CA United States) –
“Last Stand on Zombie Island” has a corny, B-moviesque title, but don’t pass it up based on that. This is not the usual undead shlock about jagoff survivors tearing each other to shreds or making other moronic decisions in the face of a zombie apocalypse. Nor is it a heavy-handed political commentary or even a bleak examination of the human condition. LSOZI rides the fine line between other works of zombie fiction and carves out a niche of it’s own amidst the tsunami of it that the last decade has brought. It is a book well worth reading if you are a fan of survival horror as it focuses largely on the military and civilian responses to the timely zombie outbreak. I say “timely” because in this case, the worldwide outbreak happens to coincide with World War III, muddying up the waters as nuclear blasts have rendered communication difficult to say the least and most of the story (meaning up until the last chapter) is spent with the survivors nearly clueless about what the hell is happening to the world.
While the expansive cast of LSOZI aren’t exceptional, author Christopher L. Eger draws upon a vast knowledge of military procedures and strategy, boating, and other things that seldom make their way into survival horror stories and delivers an exceptional amount of detail in the defense of the islanders’ home. In spite of the book’s nature as an apocalyptic novel, it’s a fairly optimistic story that focuses on the ability of a community to come together whereas most fiction of this type tends to veer towards bleak anarchy and
nihilism. That, and the unusually well-thought out details of the story make this one a breath of fresh air in a genre that has been oversaturated with the living dead.
In spite of it’s great many strengths, LSOZI has some failings as well. Even with all of the inventive aspects that Eger brings to his debut novel, he fails to make many the characters really stand out and he leaves some definite strings untied in his rush to get to the story’s conclusion, leaving at least one major character stranded with another out seeking her never to be mentioned again. Some closure would’ve been nice, assuming “Another Last Stand on Zombie Island” isn’t on the way.
A character in LSOZI compares humanity’s existence in this double-dose apocalypse to a game of pinball, pointing out that no longer how long you can keep a game going, it’s going to end the same way. The ball is eventually going to drop. This is an excellent metaphor that is somewhat at odds with the mostly non-pessimistic story, but still makes a lot of sense and helps elevate yet another zombie story into something that’s worth your time if you are a fan of the genre. LSOZI may not be on par with the classics of the genre, but it’s
still pretty damn good and an exceptionally well thought out vision of an isolated community’s struggle with the end of civilization as we know it. “