Monster Zombie Series by David Wellington

David Wellington's story is one that all amateur authors/online bloggers dream about. He started out posting chapters of his stories on his website, in the old fashioned serial format that authors used back when newspapers and magazines were the blogs and websites of their time. The response to his tales was so great it finally garnered the attention of a publishing company. And viola! He got published and has eight, soon to be nine, books out in major markets for all to enjoy. Wellington has three series, a zombie series, a vampire series, and a werewolf series (so far has one book, not sure if there will be more). This review will focus on the zombie series.

The series starts with Monster Island. How the story is structured shows the serial beginnings of the tale, where every other chapter is told by the two main characters, Dekalb and Gary.  I forgot Dekalb's first name and I'm trying to page through the book to figure this out. Oh well. The book starts a few months after the zombie plague spread across the world like wildfire. Dekalb is on a mission to return to New York City---from where he and his young family had fled only a month before---to go to a hospital and get HIV medication for the African dictator who offered his family shelter from the zombies. With a group of teenage girl warriors, Dekalb has to navigate the plague riddled streets of the what was once the greatest city on the earth to find a hospital that has the necessary medications. Without them, he will never see his daughter again.

The other main character, Gary, was just trying to survive the zombie attacks. He was a nurse in a hospital, and when the infected started coming back to life and eating everyone in sight, Gary hid in a room and strapped an oxygen mask on and waited to die from his own bite. Here is where the zombie genre gets tweaked on its ear a bit: Wellington introduces sentient zombies. He, through Gary, offers this explanation: Zombies are mindless eating machines because during the process of dying, the brain looses oxygen and when the virus (or whatever causes zombies) runs through the blood to keep the body going after death. So how do you keep your senses about you when you get turned into a zombie? Keep a constant supply of oxygen running through to your infected brain to keep it alive after it changes. So Gary is a sentient zombie... with a little something extra. Gary and Dekalb eventually clash as their paths cross into an epic showdown that is exciting and a fresh view of the genre.

The sequel to Monster Island is more of a prequel. With Monster Nation, Wellington reveals to us how the zombie plague started. We are taken on this journey through the eyes of a young woman with no memory of who she was, or how she wound up on an oxygen bar on a boardwalk in California. Again, the story bounces between the girl, who eventually chooses a new name, Nila, and an army officer, Captain Clark, who is charged with containing this sudden spike in horror and cannibalism; but there are no true chapters. The book is split into Parts, and the only break to tell the switch between POVs, are bolded paragraphs that signal national broadcasting warnings about the strange epidemic sweeping the nation. Nila is a young woman with no past and is unaware that she was the first sentient zombie. The oxygen bar in California? Yeah, that's how that started, after getting bitten by a crazy person (zombie), Nila goes to an oxygen bar to get a blast of energy, and ends up dying while hooked up to the O2. Now with no idea who she is, or what is wrong with her, all Nila knows is that she's drawn by this strange call, this strange sense that something is pulling her to the east. Through various trials, Nila finally makes it to Colorado.

Along the way, she and Clark cross paths, both trying to figure out what is drawing the zombies to Colorado. Clark believes that this walking, talking, and congitive zombie is the key to the cause of this horror. At one point, Nila is captured by Clark's army and she finally realizes what she is, which makes her want to follow this eerie siren's call to find out what caused her death and second life. I won't reveal what caused the zombie plague, because that would take the fun out of what would make for a great summer read, but in true Wellington style, it changes the game a little in the world of zombie fiction.

The final chapter of Wellington's trilogy is Monster Planet. This books picks up 12 years after the events of Monster Island, and we are finally introduced to Dekalb's daughter, Sarah. Left alone with the militant group of women warriors by her father all those years ago, Sarah is now making the same trip her father took to the States. She arrives in New York with Aayan, one of the original teenaged warriors who accompanied her father over a decade ago, as well with other warriors. The group is on a journey to kill one of the strongest sentient zombies in the world, the Tsarevich, a young Russian boy who has amazing powers over other zombies (if you read the first book, you'd know that the sentient zombies have strange 6th senses). Sarah is special in her own right: she can see the energy signatures that zombies give off, allowing her to see into the more "supernatural realm". Also helping Sarah along this strange and gruesome journey is the advice and company of the ghost of the zombie (person?) who had killed her father, Ptolemy, an Egyptian pharaoh who wants the spirits of his mummies released, and eventually one very strange Druid, Sarah's journey to figuring out how to stop the Tsarevich and what was screwing up the ebb and flow of life and death is wrought with supernatural craziness. She also finds out what happened to her father---and that will both blow your mind and wrench your heart. After being attacked by the Tsarevish's forces, being separated from Aayan, Sarah begrudgingly joins forces with her super natural comrades and heads west.

Aayan, on the other hand, is facing a different set of troubles of her own. Captured by goons of the Tsarevich, she is traveling with them towards the source of the zombies (figured out in book 2), in order to grant them even more power. While in their captivity, she is faced with her own mortality, tempted by the zombie croonies to become one of them. They all have various powers that set them apart from humans and zombies alike, what would it be like to have that power? Have near immortality and supernatural abilities? The once battle-hardened warrior, ardent killer of all things zombie... soon finds herself asking those questions and honestly considering the possibilities. Sarah and Aayan eventually meet up far from New York at their original goal in Colorado. What results is a battle for the ages, two forces wanting the source of the zombies for two very different reasons, and Sarah has some hard choices to make in order to save herself and all of mankind.

This series is a great addition to the zombie/horror genre. Full of gruesome visuals, not-quite-reality technology, and supernatural twists, Wellington has penned a truly original zombie tale that fits well in the cannon of zombie lore and fiction. After a while, one can only watch or read so many zombie movies/books. If you subscribe to the Romero cannon, zombies are slow and dumb, pitiful and mindless eating machines. Or if you subscribe to the 28 Days or The Crazies camp, zombies are caused by more man-made viruses gone horribly wrong, but the zombies (are they really zombies if they don't die and come back?) are fast and vicious killers. With Wellington's zombie universe, there are still the dumb, mindless zombies that go and eat whatever is living, but he adds the notion of intelligent zombies that really hasn't been done before. The closest, at least to my knowledge, is seen in the last two movies of Romero's, Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead, where the zombies exhibit lingering imprints of their daily lives: they perform their old tasks (ie, pumping gas, walking an imaginary dog), or in Shaun of the Dead, the dead were easily trained to perform repetitive tasks, since that's all their brains could handle. Wellington's smart and "specially enabled" zombies make for a more intriguing tale and offer new questions and possibilities for the genre. Hell, if Stephanie Meyer can make vampires freaking sparkle (and make a hundred trillion dollars off ruining the genre forever), I think Wellington can make them have fun telekinetic powers and not do much damage to the sanctity of zombies.

And now my rating of each book, and then the series as a whole. On my scale of 1 (literary hari kari) to 10 (literary orgasmic bliss), I give the Monster Island series the following scores:

Monster Island: 8
Monster Nation: 7
Monster Planet: 7
Monster Zombie Series as a whole: 7.3

If you like zombies, horror, and monster stories in general, I think you'll like this new take on an old topic. If you're a monster purist, this trilogy might be a little too much for you to swallow, but if you keep an open mind, you'll be pleasantly surprised.