| PRODUCT DETAILS | | The Rising |  | |
The Rising
The dead are returning to life as intelligent zombies. Trapped by the undead, escape seems impossible for Jim Thurmond. But Jim’s young son is alive and in dire peril hundreds of miles away. Despite overwhelming odds, Jim vows to find him— or die trying. Joined by an elderly preacher, a guilt-ridden scientist, and a determined ex-prostitute, Jim embarks on a cross-country rescue mission. They must battle both the living and the living dead. And for Jim and his companions, an even greater evil awaits them at the end of their journey. This is the time of...The Rising.
Manufacturer: Audio Realms
Price Range: $25.76 - $35.95
 The Rising
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| User Reviews |  | Fun along the way but NO ENDING
rating: 2
I read Mr. Keene's "Ghoul" and enjoyed it, and being a zombie fan looking for some genre fiction that's well-written (so much is amateurish crap), I figured check out The Rising. Award-winning, 5-star reviews, a good writer...
It was fun until the last two pages. Our hero finds out his son is still alive a few states away, and the story is the quest to get there and rescue him. Along the way, Mr. Keene goes where few do - he actually explains the cause of the rising (no is it virus? is it chemical? act of Man? act of God?). In doing so, he freshens the take by imbuing them with intelligence and as much skill as rotting bodies can manage. He also takes it further than usual in spreading the plague to animals, which presents some darkly humorous scenes that surprisingly work - undead deer laying ambush for hunters, undead bunnies (yes bunnies) that actually give a scare (sorry to other reviewers, thought he handled that well). The usual military-gone-mad subplot but it works. But I cannot give this more than two stars, nor recommend it, because the ending is such an amazing let-down.
The story is the quest to find his son - 10 pages from the end, our hero is questioned, what if he's not still alive, he says "But I've got to know either way. If I don't, I'll drive myself crazy." And then when they get to where the kid is, Mr. Keene has the final scene occur behind closed doors, from the point of view of secondary characters waiting outside, and even then DOESN"T TELL US WTF HAPPENED. I was so pissed I actually flipped the book the bird and threw it away. We hope for a happy ending, we'll take a sad ending, but I absolutely cannot forgive NO ENDING. For all the guts Mr. Keene showed (no pun) in bucking the trend, explaining the plague, extrapolating it to all creatures, at the end he had absolutely no balls. I feel like I wasted the past four days' reading.
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Solid zombie novel
rating: 3
I enjoyed The Rising and found it a good vacation read. I am always interested to learn what the author chooses as the source of reanimation, and was pleased to see that Mr. Keene chose one from outside the norm. I did find some parts to be a bit corny, but perhaps that is in fitting with the genre. This, for me, did not stack up to Day by Day Armageddon or World War Z, but it was without a doubt enjoyable.
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Repeatative, Lackluster, Boring, Unimaginative.
rating: 1
As a fan of books and of the zombie genre in general, finding this book was a dream come true. However, the story is uninspired and drags on and on. The main character is never built up enough so that one could ever feel close and it becomes hard to even sympathize with the most mundane troubles which occur. The author writes about people as if he has never been in a public space and it all feels like he is writing something about which he knows nothing- from shooting firearms to something as simple as driving a car down a freeway, it all becomes excruciatingly boring as chapters fly by and the characters move from one situation to another, each seemingly identical to the last.
I was really disappointed. Do not buy this book.
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It only took 9 pages to quit...see how far you can make it
rating: 1
For anyone who hasn't read this book and is not insane, I stopped reading before the TENTH PAGE and am here to save you even that much trouble. Here's what you have to look forward to in the first nine pages, encapsulated with snarky commentary:
PAGE 5 (first page):
--Protagonist trapped in shelter with (identifiable, talking) zombie relatives and neighbors outside trying to get in and eat him. I Am Legend comes to mind (the book, not Wil Smith).
PAGE 6:
--He drains his wife's savings [he's a penniless bum, see below] to build a bunker/shelter for Y2K and she doesn't believe they need it. A wacky savings-draining project would never happen in any house where the wife has her own money, ever.
--The bunker is 10x15 and "holds four people comfortably." It also contains the following: three _pallets_ of bottled water, a 55 gallon drum, a generator, a toilet, a shelf of books, a desktop PC, a portable stereo and music collection, canned goods, dry goods, toilet paper (takes up a lot of space), medical supplies, guns, and "lots of ammunition". Completely unrealistic that it even holds ONE person comfortably. Four would kill each other within 48 hours.
PAGE 7
--The world died because when the zombies broke out, nobody cared...because after September 11, 2001 people had learned that disaster warnings were meaningless. [No, I'm not making that up.]
--In the far flung distant future of 2005, mankind has perfected cloning, sent a human mission to the moon (current estimate is 2037. It certainly didn't happen 3 years ago), "defeats terrorism" and are about to cure cancer.
--His first wife and his son had been "the core of his world" (lame phrasing)...until she ran off with a guy from work and still got custody of the kid(?)
--"One night stands that blurred together;" "beer and bimbos" every other weekend...in Lewisburg, West Virginia, population 3500 and full of old people (median age 46).
PAGE 8:
--The only times Jim was "truly happy" were with his son. [see below]
--His ex-wife and son move to New Jersey with her new husband. But he doesn't try to relocate, too...even though he loves his son sooo much. [see below again]
--("More women and one night stands"--in Lewisburg)
--He loses his job and his home. He is now completely free to go to New Jersey to live in an alley near his son, who is his whole world and reason for existing, but he doesn't.
--He met his new wife through "Mike and Melissa." He says that like we (the readers) already know them. No reference given. No explanation for how they know each other. Also, do married couples commonly hang out with homeless drunks? [see below]
--He lost his drivers licence, apartment, job, and--of course--"his self-respect". The only thing he had was an alcohol addiction. So, with all of this, "Mike and Melissa" decide to set up their lonely divorcee friend Carrie with him. On their first blind date with this hobo, she immediately fell in love (I guess) and "she saved him" (of course).
--8 months ago Carrie found out she was pregnant (and still no baby). How did she find out so quickly?
--Jim "loved her so much it hurt--" as if this tired metaphor wasn't bad enough he goes on to explain "--an actual, physical hurt deep inside his chest.
PAGE 9
--"Shuddering, Jim recalled..." Has anyone ever really shuddered? Has anyone ever shuddered _in recollection_?
--"The dead were coming back to life, not as mindless eating machines as in old horror movies..." Here's where you know this book is going to go wrong. "Here's my twist on the zombie tale: all the things that make zombies compelling...I'm not using."
PAGE 10:
--His wife gets sick and dies because they had "run out of pre-natal vitamins." Seriously? What did humans do before pharmaceutical companies made our lives all better?
--He suddenly says "as her condition worsened" without previously introducing her illness...or condition.
--Next paragraph is predictably sappy, then says "THE pneumonia had finally killed her." Huh? What pneumonia? A "THE" right there indicates the one you had already told us about. But you didn't. And never mention it again, I might add.
--How do you get pneumonia in a tiny room with a 55 gallon kerosene heater? [see also p. 12]
--She was 9 months pregnant...did the baby have pneumonia, too? Oops. The son-loving protagonist doesn't even mention that he lost a wife AND unborn child. Really dedicated family man, there.
PAGE 11:
--Protagonist doesn't properly dispose of his dead wife even though he knows he should...because he loves her (corpse) so much. I Am Legend again.
--He buried her under the "pine tree they had planted that summer...and held hands beneath that tree only months before." 1) Gag. 2) That tree grew awfully fast. 3) The zombies just stood there and let you dig a 6' pit?
--(He uses the word "blasphemous" awkwardly here.)
--The phones go out as well as the internet. But "his cellular was a powerful unit, able to transmit and receive beyond the concrete [underground] bunker." No way this works. No. Way. I guess that's alright, giving us this random piece of information not connected to anything whatsoever. Sure, it's unbelievable, but it's not like it's gonna ring. Obviously.
--"In the rush [he never tells us about the rush] to get to the bunker he had forgotten the charger." But he remembered to grab months (days? weeks?) worth of backup cell phone batteries? Why not just get it when the zombies were letting you stand around the back yard and dig all day?
--Also, I don't really know what "sleep mode" is for a phone. Either it's receiving, or it's off.
PAGE 12 (almost done)
--Jim goes to open the refrigerator and drink the last beer, then throw the can into the corner. Now we find out that in addition to the list above, there is also a full-size refrigerator (it's big enough to make him cold) in there and enough beer to last a former alcoholic for months, as well as a corner full of beer cans? Where does this guy sleep? Where do the four people sleep comfortably.
--NOTE: Jim is not killing himself because he lost his family days (weeks? months?) ago...he's killing himself because the beer ran out.
--He "shivered in the air pouring from the open refrigerator." There are so many things wrong with this. Before, it says he's freezing and uses the heat sparingly. If he's already freezing, how bad can the refrigerator really be? Also...the heat displacement from the fridge would heat a 10x15 space quite handily. By the way, I assume he vents his generator outside somehow. Not so good in an enclosed space. The generator would also generate heat. In fact, that little room is probably uncomfortably warm.
--He starts to kill himself. **SPOILER** He doesn't. The book keeps going. Whew! I was afraid the next 300 pages might be blank.
--He starts looking at photos and acting all maudlin. Photos which thankfully he remembered to bring with him in his rush to make it to the shelter. Photos he KNEW he would need later to remember his dead wife. "Hey, Jim, what are those pictures for?" "Don't worry about it, honey. I just want to have a picture of the person I'm going be crammed into a tiny box with for the next six months in case I forget what she looks like. Four inches away from me. Sleeping in a pile of toilet paper. Twenty-four hours a day." [In case you haven't noticed the book is full of discrepancies and vagaries in the timeline in just the first 9 pages. =]
--The photo, predictably, is them at the beach and happens to be the day she got pregnant. Not the day she TOLD him...the day she GOT pregnant.
--In this scene, the author actually says, "the woman who had been...so full of life." Like, in a book about zombies. That cliche is so bad that it isn't even used in soaps or romance novels anymore. I don't watch soaps or read romance novels, but I'm pretty sure this is true.
PAGE 13 (the ninth page!)
--Okay, there's no way this could get any more sappy, right?
The other photo is on a perfect summer day, of him and his son--who looks just like him, of course--who is holding up his soapbox derby trophy. (That he won with his new dad in New Jersey. Seriously.) This is so sappy, it's unbelievable that it appears in a horror novel. Even for contrast, or character motivation.
This is where I put down the book in disgust for a whole day. I came back later to skim it and see how bad it could get...so you don't have to!
BONUS PAGES!
PAGE 14:
--A phone conversation between Jim and his son that will literally make you vomit. Literally. Like, on the book. And then you'll have to make up something when you return it to the librarian.
PAGE 15:
--He cocks the slide on his Ruger and starts to squeeze the trigger (which takes a really long time in tense moments) and...
his cell phone rings! You know, the one with super powers?
--Allow me to interject that for the past 6 pages, he has been telling us that the only times Jim was truly happy is to talk to his son on the phone. Talking On the phone. With his son...
--And when his phone rings, he doesn't answer it. He...doesn't answer it?
--[P.S. Cell phones always have caller ID. Can you guess who it was? I won't tell you, because I don't want to spoil it.]
PAGE 16 (twelfth page of the book, if you've made it this far)
--He picks it up as soon as it stops ringing. Mere seconds later, to check his messages (but doesn't check the caller ID to notice an area code from New Jersey or phone number that he's called every Saturday for the last 5 years).
--When he checks his voice mail, he hears a mechanical whirring sound. What?
--Anyway, 3 seconds after missing the call he checks his voice mail to find a 10-minute long message from his son...
--...that ends, just as the last battery of his cell phone uses the last of its electricity. By now I can only dry heave. I'm guessing his cel phone died because he could have just called him back and that would have ruined the whole book. Or ruined it MORE, I guess.
Some other highlights:
1) They just happen to meet the lone surviving scientist who is responsible for destroying the world. The very "guilt-ridden scientist" from the back cover blurb. *SPOILER* It's not really science, either. Sort of.
2) Worst ending that I've ever read, EVER, and I've read a lot of crap. AND I only read the last 2 pages. [The only worse ending I've ever seen was a PC Game called "The Eye of the Beholder" which booted you to DOS as a reward.]
3) Zombie animals like mice, and zombies telling jokes or one-liners. Zombie beef that eat YOU! Zombie fleas and ticks. (I made that up, but not about the animals. And it appears from other reviews that there are, in fact, deer that eat hunters.)
The basic premise of the story, despite already having been done in hundreds of other books and dozens of movies--a parent fighting to save their child--is alright in its own trite way. Beyond that, it's a complete waste of time. It's about as well-written as your average summer movie.
I like zombies. I like zombie movies. I like zombie books. But I do not like bad prose, bad characters, bad "science", or bad plot.
I'm so glad I checked this book out at the library, I would have been so mad if I'd bought it on Amazon.
If you STILL don't want to believe that the book is bad, the author writes the horribly contrived sequel (City of the Dead), then stops there. Why no trilogy? Because this storyline sucks. The characters and stories bore the guy who created them!
Wait, you say, maybe he just got tired of zombie books. Alas, no, he hasn't retired or stopped writing zombie stories.
In fact, in his next book (Dead Sea), he sets it in a completely different zombie universe than this one...because this one sucks.
I'm not sure if "Leisure" fiction refers to the publisher, the editor, or the author. I'm also not sure who is giving this book 5 stars.
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The Beginning
rating: 4
This was my first experience with Brian Keene. I love his writing style. He grabs you and keeps you throughout.
I am sure this book will take a lot of hits for not staying with the zombie "formula". This is an original zombie storyline and I think gives it a much different feel. I personally liked the originality. It's not to say these are NOT slow walking, flesh eating, rotting flesh hanging off bone type zombies . . . they are, but they are so much more. Can't say more without giving away plot.
Highly Recommended (along with the two follow-ups City of the Dead and Dead Sea).
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The Rising
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