Rot & Ruin: The First Review of 2012

My first review of 2012! And it is the ever-mentioned and hyped review of Rot & Ruin by Jonathan Maberry. But believe me, folks, it was well worth the wait! Add this book to the ever growing list of amazing books by Jonathan Maberry. His Joe Ledger series continues to thrill and entice readers with each page and volume. With Rot & Ruin, Maberry ventures into the realm of the Young Adult genre, and does so with a bang.

The story starts almost 15 years after the zombie apocalypse in a small outpost of survivors. In this new post-zombie world, electricity is almost unheard of, most modern inventions have been forgotten, and you have to pull your weight around the town. When one turns 15, one has to get a job; if you don’t have a job your food rations get cut in half. That is where our main characters come in. The Imura brothers are well known in the outpost, Tom for being a zombie hunter, and Benny for being his little brother. Benny is just turning 15 and has to find a job in the compound or fear losing half his food rations. His brother Tom was hoping he’d continue the “family business” by being a zombie hunter, or a “closure specialist” as he’d rather be referred as. Being a closure specialist means that he went into the Rot and Ruin—the world outside the safety of the compound—and would find the zombified family members of those living in the compound and put them to rest. Benny, being an angsty teen, would rather do anything than the family business and be around Tom. Benny blames Tom for the death of his mother during the First Night, running away instead of helping her escape from the clutches of a zombie. After several horrible attempts to find a job that he liked, he knew he had to get a job fast before his time ran out on his full rations. Benny finally accepted the apprenticeship with his brother.

Then the amazingness of the book kicks in. Benny is thrown into a world he had no idea existed, and all the things he thought he knew and believed in were thrown on their ear. Tom showed him how the “real world” was out on the Rot & Ruin, how the world isn’t as black and white as the people in the compound believe it to be; or how they force it to be. The zombie bounty hunters he once idolized quickly became sinister villains, more monsters than men. Even the zombies themselves lose their horror and earn an odd level of sympathy and pity. Benny gets sucked into a darker world than he ever knew existed when the once godlike bounty hunters kidnap one of his friends and drags her out into the Ruin; because the Imura brothers had learned of a HUGE secret the bounty hunters would kill to keep silent. Striking out on an epic journey that will test both brothers, Tom and Benny go after her. During this rescue mission Benny reaches a turning point in his young life. He no longer is a whiny teenager, mad at the world. He has started his journey to becoming a man and paving the way for Benny to become a proper “closure specialist”.

This book is simply amazing. I know I’ve been using that word to describe this book, but that’s really the only word I can think to do it justice. I must admit that at first, the first few chapters were a little hard to slug through. I had to plow through the angsty bemoaning of Benny. But as I sit and look back on it now, Maberry did an excellent job of bringing the discontent of the teens of today into the world of the zombie. Benny was mad at the world and wanted so much more than what he had, while the world around him was struggling to survive day to day, his version of being mad over not getting an iPad for Christmas or not getting a new car for his birthday. Tom tried on numerous occasions to get Benny to think outside himself, to see beyond the glamour of the bounty hunters and the complacency of living the compound. All Benny could focus on was himself, his misery, and trying to make the best of his lot in life. But once Tom got Benny out into the Rot & Ruin to teach him what the world was really about, I finally got into the story. And was I glad I forged through the initial angst. It was an epic coming of age story in a zombie world, with every page you watched Benny get stripped down layer by layer only to slowly get rebuilt with a new world- and self-vision.

Maberry also worked miracles by describing the zombies in such a way that they demanded our sympathy, our sadness, our pain. These were not monsters, vicious creatures who wanted to kill and eat. How he described the field of zombies in the abandoned town the brothers found, the one zombie who had just stopped walking and was now entwined by vines and weeds? It was heartbreaking to think that the zombie just stopped and… waited. It had nothing else to do in its life. It just became part of the landscape, detailed simply and beautifully by Maberry. And the ending when the brothers go on one last closure? Don’t get me started! Dear God, I was crying.

I’ve read the three Joe Ledger books by Maberry, all being of the über-masculine, action-thriller, crazy-science-gone-wrong genre of books that don’t leave much room for emotions or personal growth of the characters. There’s nothing wrong with that, those books are equally amazing in their own right. Rot & Ruin was the first book by Maberry that I read that hit me on an emotional level. Not only was there thrilling action scenes with bounty hunters and zombies, but there were tender moments where Benny and his group of friends were broken out of their little sheltered lives after the events that changed them all forever, and Maberry did an excellent job hinting that not all of them will come back from this completely okay. As you read this book, you know that these events are putting other events in motion that will change how all these people who live in the compound view their world and relate to each other.

If you love zombie books you need to read this book. If you love anything by Jonathan Maberry, you need to read this book. If you want something that combines all of the above components and then adds an astonishing emotional depth to the zombie genre, I suggest reading Rot & Ruin. There is a sequel, Dust &  Decay that I haven’t read yet (it’s still in hardcover and I can’t read hardcover books… don’t ask), but I can imagine that it is as equally amazing, so you could also pick that up. On my scale of rating, 1 (literary hari kari) to 10 (literary orgasmic bliss), I give Rot & Ruin a solid 9. I can’t recommend this book, or the author, enough.

Now, go! Make this book the first thing you read in 2012!