Zombies have taken over!#1 Bestseller!Zombie hordes created by the evil Pharmakon company have taken over the world, including the one place that always thought it was safe from the calamities of the outside: the quiet, scenic shores of Newfoundland’s west coast. In this horrifying first volume, the island of Newfoundland is besieged by zombies and are left unprepared for the massacres that … the massacres that follow, struggling to stay alive as the city of Corner Brook falls to the undead hordes….
“[Carberry] draws in his readers from the first page, effortlessly providing the tension and fear necessary to create his terrifying apocalyptic tale.” ~ Fiona Cooke Hogan, author of What Happened In Dingle
more
Preamble
Zombies On The Rock: Outbreak had been on my TBR list for a while now. I am a great lover of fantasy but horror, and zombie horror in particular, is a type of fiction that I particularly enjoy. Not sure what our obsession with apocalyptica says about the current collective unconscious of the human psyche, but ever since my friend booted up Resident Evil 2 on his PlayStation back when I was thirteen, I have not been able to shake my adoration of it. Between video games, movies, comic books, Max Brooks’ stuff – I have love seeing shit going sideways thanks to the chompy dead.
A note about my reviews: I consider myself an appreciator, not a critic. I know first-hand what goes into the creation of art – the blood, the sweat, the tears, the risk. I also know that art appreciation is subjective and lernt good what mama tell’t me – if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I’m not a school marm grading a spelling test – I’m a reader who enjoys reading. If a book is entertaining, well-written, and I get absorbed into it, five out of five. I have gone as low as three stars – anything less than that and I will not review a book (chances are I DNFed anyway). Regardless, I wouldn’t even put a star rating system on my reviews but for the reality of storefronts like Amazon.
Take from that what you will.
Review – 5/5
Having grown up in Newfoundland, I can’t really tell what it must be like for an outsider consuming media related to my home and native land (that’s a lyrical reference to the provincial anthem Ode To Newfoundland for the uninitiated). Still, the popularity of Hudson and Rex and The Republic of Doyle suggest that come from aways dig what we’ve got. Some stuff written on The Rock (which is a reference to the colloquial name for Newfoundland and has nothing to do with the dated Sean Connery vehicle or wrestler become A-list action star), is subtle about its influence. Some writing sports Newfie geographical pants like Stephen King wears Maine slacks. And other printed bits are in your face with the toutons (a fried bread breakfast item that trumps pancakes), the moose (an introduced species that has flourished and is responsible for many car accidents and divine game meat that makes a mean sausage), the puffins (colourful birds well-known to frequent the coast), and the bakeapples (AKA cloudberries: delicious and rare orange things that grow in the swamps here and in Scandinavia).
As you can guess from the almost comically ‘what you see is what you get’ title, Zombies On The Rock makes no bones about what’s on the menu: Newfoundland and zombies.
The tropes are all here folks. From the evil pharmaceutical company to the troubled hero cop to the news reports from other parts of the country to the super soldier serum and the latent psychopath who has finally found his existential milieu in the wreckage of the apocalypse, there are so many elements and nods to other horror works that I get the feeling that Skipper (a local honorific that hearkens back to the golden years of fishing on the island) Carberry has enjoyed his share of zombie fiction in his day. Most everything is written in bombastic caricature reminiscent of schlocky B-horror, from moments of absolutely ludicrous dialogue and visceral and gratuitous munching of leg flesh to the necessary hospital outbreak scene (where else do you go when you get sick?)
In Newfoundland, we have a way of referring to the country, a place that is quite expansive on what is actually a rather large land mass (anything west of ‘the overpass’ leading out of St. John’s on the eastern tip): the bay. In a reversal of how ‘townie’ is done on the mainland, people from ‘the bay’ are called ‘baymen’ regardless of sex whilst city folk coming out of the large capital of St. John’s are ‘townies.’ Being a born and raised townie, I can still appreciate how the bay feels, having spent some time ‘around the bay’ in my years. Skipper Carberry certainly conveyed the feeling of the bay, as Outbreak is largely set in the western part of the island, featuring various familiar town names and the one other city on The Rock (Corner Brook).
Full disclosure: there are a few rough edges, including various grammatical, punctuation, and usage errors, and the characterization is not particularly deep, but I would encourage you not to let these types of things trip you up. It is a relatively quick read and the language is quite approachable – Skipper Carberry does not mess around with any dialect play, though there is fertile linguistic ground for doing so on this fine island of ours. Instead, the English is quite clear and the Queen’s own.
Bottom line: if you like zombies and Newfoundland, or are interested in either, you would do well to check out Skipper Carberry’s multi-part zombie opus. I understand that he’s released part four at this point, and there is enough of a hook to bring you into the next book in the series (titled The Viking Trail, hopefully a reference to Viking zombies coming out of the historic Viking landing site in L’Anse-Aux-Meadows at the northern tip of the island – not probable, given that these are virus zombies and not grave zombies, but a man can dream…)
I now feel the strange urge to go to Marie’s (a local convenience store) and get some touton dough. Thankfully, there’s some molasses in my cupboard – maple syrup on toutons is a goddamn travesty.