Zombies and Shit

Simply written, but incredibly entertaining and unique. You will not forget the characters you meet in this book.

So I finished reading Carlton Mellick III's - Zombies and S*** and I wanted to write a review of this glorious book so that anyone reading this will understand why they have to read this book if they love zombies.First off, Carlton in his intro is correct in that I have never read another book that uses the Return of the Living Dead zombies as the base for their zombies. (And I have read tons and tons of zombie books as this point) The return of the living dead is different from all of the other zombie rules because there is no handy headshot kills. Also it is unique in that in the Return of the Living Dead mythos it is not just the recently dead who come to life it is all the dead that this chemical touches, graveyards full of them dig their way out and come forth to wreak havoc among the living. You can chop the heads off of these guys all day long but their bodies will still keep on coming. Hack off a hand and it will still crawl over and try to kill you. The only way to kill it for sure is to burn it to ashes. Which of course releases the toxins which animated it in the first place once more.But I digress, back to the book.Ok so using the return to the living dead as a basis for his zombies Carlton sets out to create a world where these zombies exist! Now what he came up with is an island where the remaining survivors have come to live and they each live in these diverse zones. From poorest to richest. The poorest being the copper, then silver, then gold and finally platinum being the richest. It is interesting and spells out our society much clearer then any of us I am sure are comfortable with. A few years before the start of the book the ultra elite rich in the platinum zone have reintroduced television as a form of entertainment. One of the biggest shows on their networks is called Zombie Survival.Zombie Survival is a show where they chloroform a group of contestants and when they wake up they are in a city in the middle of the zombie wasteland with only a backpack of supplies to help them. There is a map in the backpack with a location of a helicopter to get them out, sadly there is only room for one in the chopper. So the contestants must fight the zombies and each other to get out. They have made some little robot flying cameras that follow the characters around and broadcast the action back home. If the characters attack the cameras they explode leveling a whole block.This is very brilliant! As a basis for a book there is so much you can do with this and CMIII does! It goes far beyond the realm of sanity and into the brightest firmament of weirdness.Now the characters, I am not going to give away more than that of the plot, and I only gave that away because you can read that much in the blurbs and reviews of this book anyways.There are a cast of characters who are stuck out in the wasteland for this season of the show.Charlie is a guy who you want to live!His girlfriend is named Rainbow Cat...she you will want to die in agony, millions of times.Junko at first you don't like very much but will later come to love!Nemesis is amazing, you will love her.Heinz is well... awful you will love to hate him.Vine, Zippo and Xiu you are going to love them very much indeed.Scavy at first I hated and wanted to die quite thoroughly, but then he grows on ya...Laurence is by far the sleeper character of the book. You are not only going to love him once he secret is revealed but you are going to spaz out at how amazing he is and how out-right hilarious!This book was fantastic, it takes you across the writhing chainsaw blade of violence into the darkest fetishist nightmare imaginable and on up into the realms of devil-may-care mayhem that we all dream of in those bright astounding dreams that we wish were real. I enjoyed this book so very much and if you, like me, are a zombie lover and you have not read this book yet. You are doing yourself a disservice. This book is by far the most original zombie novel I have ever read in my entire life. There are very few books that can stand near the high mark this book has set for the genre.Buy this book and read it.It is well worth it.T. Patrick RooneyAuthor of Bakemono...

When the zombie outbreak caused the collapse of society fifty years ago, Neo New York was formed, along with the four quadrants; Platinum, Gold, Silver & Copper. Copper, home to the dredged of society became easy pickings for the contestant pool of a sick and twisted TV game show. A group of people wake up in the "Red Zone" after having been drugged and abducted. Now contestants in the game, they are told by a recorded voice they have three days to navigate to a helicopter that will transport only one person off the mainland and the winner will be granted access to live in the coveted platinum quadrant.Each contestant is provided a bag with food, water, and a weapon. But the weapons are assigned specifically tailored to each contestants fighting prowess. From the irony of a small dagger to rocket launchers, contestants attempt to fight their way to the finish line.Some volunteered themselves, some volunteered someone else and found themselves in the game, and the rest were victims of unfortunate circumstance.A hippie wife and her author husband, an R&D nerd, a scorned game employee, merc punks with gadgets, Mr T (?!), a sexual deviant, a white supremacist, a gang leader and select members of his crew, a lizard mutant girl, a devout Christian, an ego maniacal self-proclaimed genius, an underage prostitute, and a few more are pitted against each other in addition to the most vicious pack of undead I've ever seen. Not to mention the wildly creative cyber zombie dogs, zombie pigs and elephants, smart zombie cars.It's been a while since I've seen zombies begging for brains reminiscent of the 1985 campy Return of the Living Dead. Braaaaaains! Man oh man, did I laugh when one of the zombies began whining for brains in spanish. Cerebros!Carlton Mellick has a knack for creatively describing zombies. Readers are given living corpses, radioactive corpses, corpses with items melded into their skin after fifty years of no stimulation. Oh, and did I mention Mr. T?!"When Charlie looks, he sees a naked man staggering through the weed-coated parking lot. His skin has melted off of his body, his face nothing but a skull buried in fluffy pink meat, his intestines wrapped around his neck like a scarf."There was only one scene in the book that was too much for me. Reading about the sex/poop activity. I'll leave that to your imaginations. And as you read this and assume you've figured it out, I assure you, you haven't even scratched the surface. I may have vomited in my mouth a bit...just saying.I bow to Mellick's masterful creation. Zombies and S*** fed my need for a down and dirty gore-fest. Chapter after chapter I fell deeper in blood-lust and salivated for more disgusting content. I think I have whiplash from trying to follow all the action. If you think you're reading about a main character...you're wrong, because no one is safe from a disturbingly gruesome death.Zombies and S*** is a jaw dropping experience in which the action never ceases. At 400+ pages! I couldn't stop reading. I kept reading in the car, sitting in the doctors office waiting room, at the grocery store...there was no way I was allowing real life to come between me and my love affair with this book.Five stars on fire isn't enough for this book...I rate this an infinite amount of stars. If I were to be completely blunt, this may very well be the best piece of zombie fiction I have ever read. Not since Iain McKinnon's Demise of the Dead have I had to stop mid-read and shout from the rooftops (or more specifically...shout a tweet) my love for a book. If you value my reviews and use them to select books, then do not miss this one.Want more reviews? Visit bookie-monster.com

I was around to watch Return Of The Living Dead when it first came out on VHS (too young for the cinema) and had high hopes for this book.Many reviews said it was gory and funny. The book certainly is funny in places, there are certainly some bizarre events which appealed to my sense of humour, but gory - no. Zombies don't seem to be described that well either.The actual novelisation of the Return Of The Living dead movie, by John Russo, is gory (be sure you get the right one, there are two Return Of The Living deads by Russo. One is a sequel to Night, and the other, as I said, is based on the movie). The Raft by Stephen King is gory. Some stories in Skipp & Spector's book of the dead are gory.This isn't really gory at all. You won't be shocked at the gore, although there was a sex scene I can't unread!For the comedy value and the fact I'm old as dirt and I'm not the target audience of this book - I award 3 stars. If you're after gore this isn't the book for you.

‘Zombies and S***’ follows a group of characters picked out of the poor quadrant of a dystopian future New York, and ditched on a zombie infested island for the televised entertainment of the rich masses. Escape is limited to one seat in a helicopter that will carry the winner to the rich sector as their prize, but who’s going to make it to the chopper?The book is written in third person present tense. This isn’t a narrative choice I come across often and I’m not overly keen on present tense in general, but I have to say it worked very well for this book, keeping the action moving, and dragging the reader along in the story’s destructive wake.The ‘Battle Royale with zombies’ plot was instantly appealing and it didn’t disappoint. With a few great twists and some jaw-dropping surprises, this was an awesomely entertaining read, amusing and disturbing in equal measures. I’m not sure I can say much more without dropping stinkin’ huge spoilers so the only other thing I’ll say is this – this book contains two of the rankest sex scenes you’ll ever read, back to back! Depending on your sense of humour, I suppose you might find them more amusing than gross – and they were admittedly kind of funny - but I really could have done without the first one – yuck.The dystopian backdrop with rich and poor divided into different quadrants was well developed and believable. There are a lot of characters, but this never got confusing as they were all distinctive and came with their own memorable back stories. For some bizarre reason I was picturing Alicia Silverstone as Rainbow Cat, the whole way through. I don’t know if it was something about the drawing of her character, or what, but there you go. I also thought the pacing of the book was pretty much spot on, keeping the tension high while infilling the different character back stories, which in themselves were all interesting.I would highly recommend this book to fans of horror, zombie fiction fans looking for something new, and your typical garden-variety deviants. Best read with a sense of humour and maybe a sick bag, just to be on the safe side.

I knew nothing of Bizarro movement until recently and ordered this along with Edward Lee's Carnal Surgery  Both books are mad and brilliant.For me this Zombies and... was a good starting point. A bunch of diversely different 'people' (some human,some not-so-much) including the genius involvement of the terminator version of Mr T are drugged and wake up on an island, given a weapon and told that only one person can survive and escape within a certain amount of time and that it will all be filmed for television. So far, so 'Battle Royale'. But, unlike those kids, this group not only has to fight each other but also zombies,loads of zombies. These are old-skool zombies for the most part but just because they move slow doesn't make them any easier to avoid, in fact they're almost impossible to kill e.g decapitated heads still roll around snapping at ankles and groaning.It's to the credit of the writer that each character we meet is believable,you may not like some of them and hope they die and be guiltily gleeful when something disgustingly terrible happens to them or you may really like them and hope they live even though you know they probably wont. Mellick sets the scene vividly, flicking into the past to reveal the histories of not only the enigmatic characters but the post-apocolyptic world they came from where the poor people have to die to entertain the rich and not just die but get torn to bits and munched on and then thats still not enough to keep up the t.v. ratings.There's some social dissection here which adds weight to the witty,tar-black funny,gross-out thrills. The pace never slackens,the plot never releases its choke-hold and, like the characters,you never know what horrid scene is evolving around the corner that you'll have to deal with next. A must for any zombie fan with a brain (yours or someone else's if your desperate) Enjoy.Thank you. The Bizarro Starter Kit (Orange) If you liked this book,try that. Carnal SurgeryThe Bizarro Starter Kit (Orange)

This was my first book by this author. Suffice to say I have ordered 3 more. This book reads like watching a high quality film, scenes change quickly and there are many quirky fast turnarounds. The characters are all well developed so, even though bizzare the reader really cares about them. So, a shock when the, initial, hero is quickly killed. An exciting well written ride. My only reservation - and this is down to the publisher not the author, is the number of typos. They always pull me out of the story and break the flow.

i loved this book so well written it keeps you intrigued right till the end. i wish i had of read this sooner as it was recommended to me a few years ago. It is one of the best books i have read all year