The Colony: Genesis by Michaelbrent Collings

The Colony: Genesis is about Ken, a high school history teacher, who is in the middle of teaching a class when half the world turns into zombies and starts attacking the other half.

Without a thought to his students or fellow teachers, he quickly leaves the school in order to go to the bank, which his wife and children are visiting.

Along the way he is rescued repeatedly by strangers who desire nothing more than to keep Ken alive.

I love zombie novels, and I love what the author wanted to do with this book – write a hopeful horror novel with terrifying zombies. Unfortunately, this book failed on both those counts.

While there were some things I liked about this book – a scene at the end is very powerful, there are some interesting hints at what might make these zombies different (although they’ve a lot in common with the World War Z movie zombies and the ones from Cell) – not much happens in this book. There’s the usual outbreak, destruction and banding together of survivors. Even though this is the first in the series, there is no resolution at the end of this book.

So, the pacing didn’t work for me. I think this whole book could have been covered in two chapters. The first 20 chapters or so were very difficult to read as they were written in short, fragmented sentences. I think this was to create tension, but it had the opposite effect because it was over used. Despite everything being described in minute detail, I struggled to picture the scenes.

The characters didn’t work for me either. None of them behaved in a realistic way. There’s our protagonist, Ken, who dislikes strip Jenga, is an expert in martial arts, and has the strongest plot armor I’ve ever seen. He survives because he meets other people whose sole mission in life is to save him. They’ve no interests of their own, they don’t know him, but they decide to continually save him.

I love zombie books because of the symbolism of the zombies and the strength of the characters, but this book didn’t intrigue me on either count. What a shame.

I award The Colony: Genesis…