From the Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of THE HAUNTED FOREST TOUR and WOLF HUNT comes another action-packed over-the-top creature feature!Rusty Moss has raised his niece Mia since she was a baby. Now that she’s almost eighteen, he’s worried that the life he’s given her—living off the grid in a cabin deep in the woods—is holding her back from her full potential. But that angst gets pushed … pushed aside when the undead forest animals arrive.
At first it’s just a squirrel—shockingly violent and almost impossible to kill. Followed by a grizzly bear, also aggressive and resilient, even when point-blank shotgun blasts to the face are involved.
Now the cabin is surrounded by all manner of zombie creatures. They have no way to call for help. The truck that could take them to safety is three miles away, stuck in the mud.
But Rusty and Mia have their courage. They have their wits. And, most importantly, they have an axe and a fully fueled chainsaw…
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There are few genres in which characterization is more important than the horror genre. If you don’t care about the people to whom terrible things are happening, it’s hard to care deeply about the book. When I picked up Ferocious by Jeff Strand, I was a little bit worried about his ability to pull off the characters mentioned in the blurb—a recluse raising his niece off the grid in the middle of the wilderness. It seemed quite likely the author would slip into caricatures as he wrote about a zombie apocalypse in the backwoods. I could not have been more wrong. In the very first chapter he establishes Rusty Moss as both a hard man who hates people and someone that you absolutely have to love. In the next chapter he establishes Rusty’s niece, Mia, just as credibly. And this father-daughter style team will capture your heart as they struggle to survive one of the weirdest twists on the zombie apocalypse that I have ever read.
Strand is a master at building tension—not only with the ever-growing level of danger but with the very credible mistakes that Rusty and Mia make throughout the novel. They never do anything stupid, but many of their plans and reactions go badly awry. This makes them remarkably human as they deal with a horror they can’t quite believe is really happening to them.
One of the best distinguishing features of this novel is the vast array of zombie creatures that threaten Rusty and Mia. Strand has really thought out the strengths and weaknesses of the various undead forest animals so there is never a point in which the action gets routine. Even the smallest animals are dangerous and this gives the novel a decidedly different flavor from every other zombie story I have read.
Finally, I’d like to take a moment to talk about the vocal talents of narrator Scott Thomas. It’s not an easy thing for a man to craft a believable voice for a seventeen-year-old girl, but Thomas pulled it off and without his ability to do this, the audio book would not have worked nearly as well. He also catches the humor and affection in the back and forth banter of Rusty and Mia. His narration takes an excellent story and gives it that extra touch of magic to finish bringing it to life.
I received this book from Audiobook Boom in exchange for an honest review.
FEROCIOUS, by Jeff Strand, is a novel that instantly put me in mind of the character “Ash” in the Evil Dead movies–albeit without the human zombies. This was an unapologetic gore fest of severed limbs and decapitated bodies, full of inappropriate dark humor.
In short, it was just the sort of novel I love.
For readers familiar with Jeff Strand’s work, his sarcasm and twisted humor are a given, present in even his more “serious-toned” books. This novel doesn’t disappoint.
We have Rusty, a young man living alone in his cabin, surrounded by woods for miles. He makes a living selling handmade furniture and interacting with other humans as little as possible. At least he did, until the day a lawyer pulled up with tragic news, and Rusty’s infant niece.
“. . . Even with the bandage, she was way less ugly than most of the babies he’d seen.”
Then we have Uncle Rusty and a grown up–and just as sarcastic–Mia. I love the banter between them, with even the most common of topics carrying a comedic thread that never wanes.
Things start out slowly enough, but keep in mind two things: One they live in a cabin miles away from the nearest road, and Two, Jeff Strand is the author.
“. . . It would have been easier to stab it, like somebody picking up litter in a park, but that seemed oddly disrespectful, even though the squirrel already had a hole in it . . . ”
The entire time I read this, I had no problems visualizing it as a movie. We have the over-the-top actors, the forest acting as a natural barrier between them and the rest of the world, and of course, my mind was conjuring up all the different types of wildlife that call that area home. (Living in the middle of the country, being brought up on horror movies as a child, helped my imagination tremendously).
“Though it was difficult to gauge homicidal intent in the gaze of a squirrel, this thing really did give the impression of wanting to kill him.”
Is this the novel of the century that’s going to challenge your rational thinking?
Most probably not.
However, it is an extremely action-packed novel that will likely get you laughing at inappropriate comments and scenes. That alone makes reading it worthwhile, in my opinion.
“What could possibly have happened in this forest to make the inhabitants not care if their nose got sawed off?”
Overall, I could read just about any kind of book this author puts out, and enjoy it immensely–regardless of the subject matter. It’s his unique style that pulls me into his characters’ lives, the situation they’re in, and whatever adversary they encounter. In this case, it happens to be undead forest creatures. How could you not enjoy a book like that?
“. . . Rusty could tell that she was leaning much more toward ‘the entire forest is full of undead horrors’.”
There were a few places in the novel where the dialog and action felt a bit repetitive, but it didn’t take long for the situation to alter, and for some new, darkly horrific–yet somehow still comedic–event to stir things up a bit. If you’ve read anything by Jeff Strand in the past, or enjoy sarcasm mixed with your horror, then you’ll want to check FEROCIOUS out. (Of course, if you were foolish enough to buy you OWN house in the middle of the country, surrounded by squirrels, deer, fox, coyote, turkey, and dozens of other animals in place of humans, you may finding yourself cursing the author every time you have to go take your mini-doodle for a walk at night….)
“Fuck mud.”
You may also want to avoid the mud . . .
Recommended.
Jeff Strand is a master of combining humor and horror, achieving exactly what is needed to entertain the heck out of the reader. Ferocious brings forth a spirited flourishing relationship like no other, and then attacks it with a animalistic zombie-ish gore and gristle storyline. Survival is indeed priority for the main characters and the reader with this enjoyable romp into beastly undead territory.