Omega Zombie is the second title I have read by Alan Gandy. (The first of which was a collaboration comic called Them.) This book is as unique as it gets. To give you a slight insight into the book’s style, I provide the description from Amazon.
“Hello and goodbye. My name is Penny Goodfellow and I am about to die. Again… After tonight, there will be no more monsters. You see, I’m the last.”
Great start, right?
Originality 5/5
If it were possible to give a book a higher rating on originality, I would definitely do so for Omega zombie. The premise is delightfully ridiculous. (I will do my best to avoid spoilers, as always, but there were zombies, vampires, mention of fishmen, and Satanists come to bring forth the anti-christ. Oh boy!) The narrator is a 15 year old girl, and it is her destiny to destroy the world rather than to destroy it. This book flips the script in basically every way imaginable, and it was a fun (albeit absurd) time.
Entertainment 5/5
This book felt like a mix between a B-movie and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I personally love low budget, ridiculous films so this was entirely up my alley. There were certainly moments where even I had to roll my eyes, but overall it was a enjoyable. On top of it’s high entertainment value, the book was a very quick read. I was a bit rushed this week so I was grateful to have a book that I could zip through fairly quickly.
Writing Style 3/5
Gandy wrote the book from the perspective of a 15 year old girl, which is not exactly his native tongue. Penny Goodfellow (the main character) had a fairly consistent voice throughout the book. There were some parts that didn’t quite agree with me due to lousy analogies or forced dialogue, so this section lost a few points.
Character Description 2/5 & Scene Description 3/5
Only a few of the characters mentioned received detailed descriptions, which is why that measure got such a low rating. There were illustrations throughout the book which were intended to follow the story, but providing a handful of sketches isn’t quite the same thing as providing detailed descriptions. The same can be said for the scene descriptors. There were many times when the scene was left mostly up to the imagination of the reader. Scene descriptions were more frequent then character descriptions, however, and during fight sequences I would say that the events transpiring were described in greater detail than any individual ever was.
Overall 4/5
If you enjoy quirky, corny horror this book is probably something you would enjoy. It’s a quick and relatively painless romp through the world of zombie fiction, but because of the absurdity you don’t really get your feet wet. This book doesn’t really make you bond with the characters or get attached to them due to their flat personas (which is fortunate for you; you’ll understand if you read the book), but that doesn’t make it any less fun. I will probably be reviewing some of Gandy’s other works in the near future.
