Author of sci-fi/fantasy, horror and adventure/thriller fiction

HATE THE SIN by Artyom Dereschuk

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While browsing Amazon, I stumbled upon a horror novel whose stark cover and title caught my eye. HATE THE SIN by Artyom Dereschuk combines the brutality of being a child soldier fighting for an African warlord with an interesting horror premise involving the undead and a hidden underground world. I came away with some criticisms of the book’s construction, but overall, I found the story fresh, visceral, and engaging.

The novel follows several child soldiers fighting for a warlord during the Liberian civil war in the 1990s. They carry menacing names like “Corpse Eater” and “Desecretor,” and some of them don’t even remember their real names anymore. Their lives as fighters are brutal, not only because they are forced to fight, but because the adults can be cruel and because the man known as General Malaria rules his brigade with an iron fist. After a raid on a local village turns up an unsatisfying amount of food, the General decides to punish it with a killing spree. After they kill the local priestess, the new priestess calls upon the spirits of the Underworld to avenge her tribe.

The novel has some stark strengths and weaknesses. The idea feels very fresh, and the kids, who cling to a sense of morality while living in a brutal world, are sympathetic. The brigade’s fight against the undead is engaging, and the Underworld has a strange and engaging mythology. The action is good in a story that carries through to a satisfying ending. However, sometimes, the story feels rushed, while other times it drags due to repetition, with some characters really standing out and others that are difficult to distinguish. While the novel is billed as a young adult novel, I found it a story more fitting for adults.

Overall, HATE THE SIN was a fun, dark read, offering something fresh for the horror/zombie genre.

BLACK SUMMER (2019)

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Produced by Asylum and set in the same zombie apocalypse as Z NATION, BLACK SUMMER (2019) is a Netflix series about a group of people trying to find sanctuary as the military pulls out and society collapses from the rapidly spreading infection. I picked away at this one all year, finally finished it, and found it overall good stuff but difficult to stay committed to.

There’s an interesting storytelling technique happening here; basically, it’s BUSHWICK with zombies. The idea is to follow a group of people individually and eventually all together, with Rose being the lead, a woman who must get to the evacuation center at the stadium in order to reunite with her daughter. There’s little plot other than characters either react to zombies or proactively fight for what they want as they travel from point A to B. The presentation style is pretty realistic and extremely tense, with very long takes, long stretches of moving with no dialogue, and people being terrified and aiming poorly and making mistakes exactly as they would in this type of crisis. I enjoyed this aspect the most, as it makes even a single zombie a seemingly unstoppable force, and it provides serious cathartic energy when the survivors get their thing together and achieve a victory. It also grounds the story nicely, as it’s quite believable. On the negative side, this is all you get; there’s very little going on character wise to make you care about any of these people, and they don’t dig very deep for the kind of ethical dilemmas that make apocalyptic fiction so interesting.

Overall, BLACK SUMMER was a fun watch for me, and I’d happily recommend it to zombie fans. Nothing super memorable, but definitely tense, engaging, and realistic.

THE DEAD DON’T DIE (2019)

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In Jim Jarmusch’s latest, THE DEAD DON’T DIE (2019), he digs for social commentary with a fresh take on the zombie genre that deadpans rather than bites.

The town of Centerville is dealing with some strange phenomena. Days last longer and night comes suddenly, animals are fleeing into the wilderness, and the climate is changing, with polar fracking believed responsible as it has tilted Earth off its axis. We’re introduced to an ensemble cast led by Bill Murray and Adam Driver as local cops, and including many other greats from Steve Buscemi to Tilda Swinton. While they roll with the big changes, one arrives that truly threatens extinction–the dead are rising with a hunger for flesh.

Two days later, I’m still not sure what to think of this movie. The sum here is definitely greater than the parts. As for its parts, the deadpan delivery doesn’t achieve real wit or charm, the dialogue often doesn’t go anywhere, there are no character arcs (the great acting talent feels wasted), the characters needed to be lovable for this type of film but aren’t, the political commentary panders to its core audience, and the moments of breaking the fourth wall (Adam Driver referring to the fact they’re in a movie) is more irritating than pithy. The film works better on a thematic level, even if the message is bleak: humans live their own scripts, acting out their roles because they must, with none of it meaning much, and with extinction not really changing anything and perhaps being deserved. “This is going to end badly,” Driver monotones, referring both to the zombie outbreak and life itself, but, “We have to give it our best shot.”

So overall, with its artsy director, stellar cast, and that creative playground that is the zombie genre, THE DEAD DON’T DIE had far more potential than it delivers, resulting in a beautiful swing and a miss for me as a viewer. Still, it has its charm–I didn’t hate it, and I actually kind of liked it.

THE NIGHT EATS THE WORLD (2018)

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In THE NIGHT EATS THE WORLD (2018), a young man ends up trapped in an apartment during the zombie apocalypse. The result is a highly gritty and realistic portrayal of survival and a meditation on loneliness and madness.

The film opens with Sam, a musician living in Paris, visiting his ex-girlfriend’s apartment to retrieve a box of music tapes he’d left with her. He finds a party in full swing, and his ex brushes him off until finally telling him where the tapes are. On the way there, a man bumps into him and bloodies his nose, and Sam passes out in a chair. He wakes up to discover a horrific zombie plague swept through Paris during the night. He now finds himself alone with limited means of survival.

The film is about him claiming the building as his fortress, clearing apartments, claiming tools and supplies, and basically surviving as city services begin to shut down. The loneliness slowly eats away at his sanity. In the end, he knows in the long term, he’ll die if he stays, but he’s terrified of leaving, resulting in a big decision.

THE NIGHT EATS THE WORLD worked for me as an experience that is almost unique among zombie movies. It comes close to cinema verite as we see Sam do what he must to survive, and he reacts to everything with realistic terror. The zombies themselves are terrifically done.

The challenge for this film was to make an urban Robinson Crusoe interesting. The film accomplishes this for the most part, though it does drag in places. I believe the film would have been far more engaging and powerful if there’d been some sort of character arc, some necessary change addressing a character flaw, and a stronger external goal, such as being isolated from a survivor in a neighboring building but unable to get to that person unless he takes a very real leap. The result is a great climax and a dark denouement, but the overall effect is a bit flat.

Overall, I liked it a lot and found it something different and interesting in zombie movies.

OVERLORD (2018)

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Produced by JJ Abrams, OVERLORD (2018) is a WW2 zombie movie that made me long to watch either a good WW2 movie or good zombie movie, as for me it didn’t quite achieve either. I was excited to watch it as I authored (with Tim Long and David Moody) a WW2 zombie series called THE FRONT, but in the end, I found OVERLORD predictable and boring, despite some really nice visual elements.

The movie begins with a platoon of the 101st Airborne in the skies over Normandy, preparing for the big drop in the early hours of D-Day. Aside from showing a racially integrated unit (okay fine it’s 2018), the movie starts out with overused tropes. The platoon is oddly led by a sergeant, because all sergeants are tough and crusty and lieutenants are novice weaklings, and we have, echoing SAVING PRIVATE RYAN and BAND OF BROTHERS, a “jerk who has a heart” paratrooper bragging how he’s going to killer Hitler and end the war. Everything goes badly, and with only a handful of paratroopers surviving the drop, they set out to a French village where they have to blow up a radio tower, a mission that for some reason is critical for D-Day to succeed. There, they discover the Nazis (in full purely evil sadist trope mode) are experimenting on a zombie serum to create super soldiers. Teaming up with a local woman, our band must destroy the lab and the radio tower.

Visually, the movie is nicely done, and the action is good. The protagonist (Boyce) is likeable enough, though his character is almost as flat as everybody else’s, resulting in me not caring if anybody survived. The pacing in the second act is awfully slow, wasting an opportunity to make me care about these soldiers. OVERLORD seems to want to deliver B movie schlock, and for me it didn’t achieve the pulpy, fun, comical, self-deprecating kind of B movie schlock that really works. As with many Hollywood movies, the result feels flat and paint-by-numbers.

OVERLORD’s gotten some good reviews, so as always YMMV. It’s not horrible, but I found it somewhat forgettable.

IN THE FLESH Season 2

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IN THE FLESH is an amazing British series about life after the zombie apocalypse. Told from the point of view of a zombie who has been cured and is now reintegrating into society, the series works as both an excellent drama and also for its themes of prejudice and recovering from trauma. It succeeds where its imitators like THE CURED failed. I recently finished the second season, which was as good as the first.

In the first season, Kiernan leaves a government center where zombies have been cured. The only problem is they remember everything they did while they were infected. He struggles with his guilt and shame while trying to be hopeful about being with family again, including his kind but clueless parents and his sister, who was a fighter in the Human Volunteer Force (HVF), a homegrown militia that held back the tide of the undead. The season works so wonderfully because it tells both sides really well: The HVF veterans who don’t trust the cured, have to similarly assimilate to civilian life (going from heroes to in some cases the small-town losers they were before), and in some cases are suffering from PTSD. And of course the cured themselves, who have to face family and neighbors they brutalized while infected.

Season 2 picks up where the first left off, but the tension and prejudice between the cured and the uninfected has reached a new level where it’s being institutionalized. Among the cured, an underground organization is forming to resist societal control, while the government is instituting harsher and harsher measures for controlling the cured, such as forcing them to work menial jobs to prove they’re not the bad sort and give back for what they’ve taken the country. It all comes to a head with a prophecy that if the first risen is killed at the anniversary of the rising, the dead will rise again…

This is a great series that shows how horror tropes can be used to engage people about big familiar themes in a fresh and interesting way, and how these tropes can work very well if taken seriously with solid human drama. IN THE FLESH is not so much a zombie apocalypse show as one that deals with how society would come together again after one was stopped in its tracks with a cure. Unfortunately, while there’s no third season, in the first two a complete story is told, and it’s different and compelling than what you’d usually find in the genre.