A Plague Upon Your Family by Mark Tufo
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
“But when a giant black man is screaming at the top of his lungs in a post-apocalyptic world that you need to get your skinny asses back on the truck to save yourselves, you tend to listen.”
Book two of the Zombie Fallout series picks up just moments after book one left off. We are back in Little Turtle with Mike and his family, and things are getting desperate.
But like all decent books of the apocalypse, what seems desperate in chapter one ain’t nothin’ compared to what is waiting 100 pages down the line. This book is full of action, and much much zombie fighting. And lots of poop and fart jokes, because apparently if it worked and was funny in book one, why not double down in book two?
And that’s why this book is rated one star lower for me than the first book was. The gross descriptions, the number of maggots, the allusions to the dog’s farts being things of legend, and the jokes about poop were prevalent in the first book, but here they are just a little bit obnoxious. I feel like the author cheaped out a little bit on his creativity here and just went for the quick and dirty laughs, which leaves the book feeling a little more adolescent than it’s predecessor.
I mean, lets face it, Mike is kind of the epitome of a “guys guy”. He doesn’t get women (though I disagree with the reviewers that think he and the author are misogynistic. Mike has a lot of respect for his wife, admits that she’s the one that runs the family, that she makes better decisions than him, that she’s likely smarter than him. Just because she doesn’t handle a gun that well doesn’t make her less valuable to the team). He is crude to the extreme. He’s often rude, though is self-aware about being a self described asshole. He is great with guns, seems to usually either have a plan or manages to wing it while pretending to everyone else that he’s working from a plan. One should expect gross jokes from this kind of guy, I guess? But his snarkiness in the first book was more fun, more refined somehow.
“When confronted with a wild animal (in this case a female human), it is best to avoid direct eye contact and make no fast or sudden movements.”
But I’m going to keep reading these books, not because I adore the main character – I agree with his self assessment – but because I adore Tommy, the teenage sub character that Mike rescued from Walmart in book one when he went to pick up his son from his part-time job. This kid has an awesome bag of holding type backpack that always seems to generate another Snickers or Pop Tart when it’s needed, has the most beautiful naive love of the world, and to top it all off, a psychic guide that helps him out, who happens to look and sound like Ryan Seacrest. You can’t get better than that.
Also, I like that Mike was willing to risk his life for his dog. And his dog, Henry? Yeah, he makes me want an English bulldog pretty badly.
If you adore animals, like me, you may cry during this book. Have a pet handy to hug and bury your face in. Fair warning here, I never thought a goofy, funny book about zombies would make me cry and yell and hug my dog while she licked my face, all bewildered but willing to offer comfort anyway. Cause dogs are completely awesome.
Ahem.
At any rate, I’m already plunging into the next book, and I’m hopeful that it recaptures the fun that the first book had.