by Jasper Bark

Review by Richmond Clements

Jasper (Jaspre?) Bark is the author of a few other novels. His Strontium Dog novel was excellent. However his Sniper Elite novel Spear of Destiny didn’t do it for me (probably not the fault of the writer, it just wasn’t my thing...). His Afterblight Chronicles book Dawn over Doomsday, which I haven’t read, received what could be called a mixed response from readers. So, there was everything to play for with this one- it could have gone either way.

A bit about the story first.

Bark, I suspect, shares my loathing of ‘self help’ groups and weekend retreats where people go to find themselves. So here we’ve got a retreat, albeit on an exclusive Caribbean island for multimillionaires. There they learn to interact with Zombies, learn to think like them, and thus - the theory goes - become better, more ruthless and single-minded, businessmen. You know this isn’t going to end well already, don’t you? Honestly- have none of them seen Jurassic Park?

I wasn’t sure how what to expect from the writing, but when the novel started with a pitch black joke I knew the direction we were going. There’s a nice vein of darkest humour running through this entire novel which I found delightful, and yes, I’m well aware of how incongruous that sounds.

However, I don’t want you to get the impression that it’s a laugh a minute in here - it’s far from it. Bark deals out some satisfyingly visceral and horrific bloodletting, spelling out zombie attacks in gruesome detail- most notably during one of the self help sessions, where the guests are urged to release their inner zombie....
There are also some other adult themes running through - and by adult I just don’t mean rumpy-pumpy (although there is some of that too, and of the most distasteful kind) - I mean discussions about global economic models, greed and human frailty, and I’ll come back to this later.

For this he has assembled an interesting cast of characters. Interesting but not necessarily likeable. Our main characters are a couple of self absorbed teenagers, Ben and Tatyana, who along with a group of equalling annoying friends, have a plan to free the islands Zombie population from the yolk of capitalist oppression. Add to this the bad guy, an intriguing cross between a Bond villain (with his secret island base and plans for... well that would be telling) and a Voodoo Priest and a repugnant collection of rich folks and foot soldiers and you’ve one of the most unlikeable casts outside Hollyoaks.

A third of the way into this book, I had pretty much figured out how everything was going to play out, plot-wise. This was going to happen, then this, and then into the finale, no problem. So it was to my great delight and surprise that all of this stuff had actually happened by the halfway point, and the rest of the book was undiscovered country.

There is a lot of action in here, and the story moves at a breakneck speed, helped in no small part by the (forgive me this one) bite sized chapters Bark has split the story into. Throughout the book are some genuinely fresh ideas and spins on the zombie genre, which in turn resulted in one of the few things I disliked (this is apart from my personal bugbear- the dreaded typo, of which there are a few) about it.

On a couple of occasions, Bark takes a well worn trope from the genre and flips it on its head to great effect. Unfortunately, just when I’m reflecting on how clever this is, he has one of the characters point out that this is what he’s done. And the same thing occurs during the discussions on global capitalism mentioned above - rather than leave the reader to draw the obvious conclusion, namely that capitalists are behaving just like zombies, Bark come right out and tells us. Maybe this was because he didn’t trust the writing itself and was worried reader wouldn’t see what he’d done. I don’t know, but it succeeded lifting me out of the book, however briefly.

Apart from this, I thoroughly enjoyed this volume. There are dark laughs to be had and blood aplenty flowing from a variety of orifices. I’ll confess to not being sure if Bark could rise to the challenge of such an adult themed novel, but he has proved me wrong in the most appallingly pleasing way.