Customer Reviews

Dead City

5 star:		(60)
4 star:		(49)
3 star:		(33)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

Texas has been hit hard by hurricanes and Houston is under water. North, in San Antonio, the weather has been better and they are taking in refugees. But for one policeman, things are about to become a nightmare. He is forced to terminate an argument with his wife in order to respond to a call in a bad part of town. It seems that there is some sort of street brawl going on. But after responding, the truth begins to come out. What at first looks like a gang fight is revealed to be far deadlier. Some crazy people are attacking everyone they can. They stagger about and seem unstoppable. Bullets don't seem to faze them. Many are seriously wounded but pay it no mind. To make things worse, they seem to want to bite and eat people. For lack of a better explanation, they are described as zombies. A bite from one is deadly. Their numbers seem to increase very rapidly and our hero is the only one to escape this altercation.

Then the real horror begins as he quickly realizes this is not just a local thing. The whole town seems to be overrun with the zombies. The day, and night, becomes a fight for survival and a quest to find his wife and baby. His travels have him run into other survivors, some who continue to survive and some who don't. Intermittent cell phone service lets him know his wife is alive, but not where she is. In this time of crisis, some people band together and help while others are quite the opposite. Just how this story ends is left to the reader to discover but I will say it is not a standard ending but it works very well.

This is an interesting story. Zombies are becoming the rage again in books and this is one of the better offerings. At first it reminded me of Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead comics but it quickly found a voice of its own. I found it hard to put this one down as I had to know what was going on. We never really find out what caused the zombies. Was it a mutated germ or did something in a bio-lab escape due to the hurricanes? We don't know. We also never find out how the zombies congregate so quickly (although the question is asked many times). But I do know I really enjoyed the book and am looking forward to more from this author. Check it out.

I've read my share of horror novels. It's mainly all that I read. I'm the type of reader that gives what I'm reading cinematic detailing in my head as I read it, and I have never had so much ease and fun while doing this as I had with Dead City.

Joe McKinney captured the true essence of what makes a good zombie tale. You have your usual substance of gore, relentless crowds of zombies, the apocalyptic world, and so on. But what truly made the book was the depth and power McKinney put behind his main character, Eddie Hudson. Eddie was just a regular guy working his late-night shift as a police officer when all hell broke lose in his life. The book tells the story of Eddie as he fights for his life, accompanies many side characters, and struggles to reach his wife and 6 month old son.

What was also interesting is the reasoning that McKinney gave to the dead coming back to life. That being that a recent string of hurricanes randomly exposing a virus to the Gulf Coast. Simple. Also, the characters in the book question the zombie genre themselves. From Eddie's first assumption of the reanimated dead being zombies, him uttering the word "zombie" for the first time, a character in the book being a zombie chatroom discussionist, and other side-notes about the existence of zombies.

One negative note about the book is its ending. It was a little too formulaic for me. Up until the last 3 chapters, McKinney didn't really go against zombie movie formula. He would introduce characters, make you get involved with them, only to have their limbs ripped off a few chapters later. When it came to the end - although what you were rooting for occurs - it becomes just a little too formulaic. But it's not really something I should gripe about when comparing it to the brilliance that is the rest of the book.

Joe McKinney has a great sense of writing and character development, and I really can't wait to see what he terrifies us with next.

I couldnt put it down from the moment I started reading it!!If there was ever a book that should be word for word produced into a movie,then this is it!!I would love to see this on the big screen.From one moment to the next Eddie Hudson who is a police officer finds himself in amazing situations tring to find his wife and child.I have to say this is by far one of the best written Living Dead books I have read in a while.There are no weird mind reading Orbs or freak zombie animals or evil vs good monsters,just good old plain dead coming back to life and that should be enough to scare the heck out of you!!This is one I wont sell as soon as Im finished,this one is going on my shelf right next to I am Legend.

I stumbled across Dead City at the bookstore thinking it was a reprint of the Shane Stevens crime novel, but as a zombie movie fan, I (luckily) couldn't resist buying it. McKinney doesn't add anything new to the zombie oeuvre but does deliver plenty of head-shot action written with assurance. The ending is somewhat abrupt and anti-climactic, a minor quibble with an otherwise excellent piece of 21st century pulp.

[...]
"Dead City" is a fantastic tale of survival horror that starts with a bang and never lets up. Occupying the middle ground between police procedural and zombie thriller, Joe McKinney's first novel is the tale of a lone patrolman searching for his family over the course of one horrific night.

The time is now: Texas has been pummeled by a series of brutal hurricanes, with refugees scattered across the Lone Star State in search of shelter. Many of them have settled in San Antonio, inadvertently bringing a new kind of plague with them: one that transforms those infected into bloodthirsty zombies.

Patrolman Eddie Hudson, a young man with a wife and newborn baby, is working the evening shift when all hell breaks loose. Dispatched to what he thinks is a simple fistfight, Hudson finds himself plunged head-first into the apocalypse.

Confronted with the ravenous infected, Hudson barely escapes with his life - only to find that the entire city has succumbed to the zombie onslaught.

Hudson is suddenly alone, and thousands of zombies stand between him and his family. He might just see them again, if he can survive the night.

Hudson's story is a real thrill for the reader, jam-packed with fast driving, shooting, desperate stand-offs and lots of blood. McKinney, a San Antonio homicide detective by trade, writes with an authenticity that brings the events of "Dead City" to bloody, grasping life.

Dead City by Joe McKinney is an action packed zombie novel and a strong first novel. Dead City has all the action you could want out of a zombie book and the main character is pretty well fleshed out. If Dead City has any true weakness, it's the lack of depth in the setting and the story may be a little bit too straight forward.

The story follows Eddie, a San Antonio cop, as tries to survive the zombie hordes and tries to get home to his Wife and child. Along the way he has to overcome some hard decisions and at times trust people who he normally wouldn't.

Dead City scores big points for action and gore content. The action scenes are exciting; fast paced, and keeps the pages turning. Gore is frequent and vivid. I have heard others say that this would make for a great movie, I have to agree. With the amount of action, the compelling action, and the way each scene cuts away it would make for a great film. Hopefully, some day, we'll see a movie happen.

My only reservations about Dead City are that the setting is little blurry, characters beyond the Eddie are weak and it doesn't make you think. There is enough there that nothing seems out of context, but it also left me asking a lot of questions. Eddie is truly a great character, but beyond him, the rest are fairly uninteresting but serve a purpose. This is no philosophical zombie novel, that's for sure. It's not really required for a zombie novel to be a great read, but it is nice when you do read one that gets the brain ticking. These are all pretty minor issues and in fact may not bother many readers at all.

In the end Dead City is well worth a read for it's sheer master of action and gore in a zombie novel. I cannot think of a reason why a fan of zombie fiction would be disappointed with this book.

The book is written as if you were a 15 year old child reading it. It is not geared towards adults. Plus parts just do not make sense. In one part they lose the bumper of the police car. In the next part they are pushing cars out of the way using the bumper system on the car. Huh? Another, they leave a girl in the car to move some cars blocking their way on the road. The two guys hear a scream and come back to find their car surround and the girl being munched on. Again, huh? Were these guys so far away they couldn't see ANY sign of zombies coming to the car? and no zombies went after the guys making all the noise moving cars? huh? Was she so stupid to just sit there and not run to the guys? The novel is just plain silly and dumb in parts. There is another part where they entered a fenced in area. You think "wow. How will they ever get out of this?" but again the author magically skips to one guy watching in horror as a girl on the other side of the fence is being attacked to another guy driving a vehicle through the fence. Huh? You got the impression the fenced in area was empty and now one of the guys is driving some type of vehicle through the fence. I would have enjoyed it as a young adult but not now. Skip it.

Author Joe McKinney clearly adores zombie stories, and he is out to show us a good time. The guy can write. His young protagonist is a sympathetic character and a very believable cop, the geography clearly drawn, and the action plot more than servicable. It's not difficult to suspend disbelief, because the pace rarely slows. There are several nods to classic genre scenes and some standard moments reminiscent of Romero movies, possibly Brian Keene's stuff, and numerous books and graphic novels, but I think this is a tale that winks as it entertains. McKinney says: "Hey, ain't this stuff cool?" I found "Dead City" a brisk, fun read. If you like lean, fun horror you get your money's worth and then some.

Prior to reading the book, I was not expecting much from it, just another casual, action-focused survival tale in the Zombie world. I was wrong. This book goes much, much further than that.

The story is centered around the struggle of Eddie Hudson, a San Antonio, low-key cop with absolutely nothing of a superhero. This anti-hero is motivated by a simple objective: get back to his loved ones, ie his 6-month old son and his woman-with-an-attitude wife through hostile territory. Read, a ruined city packed with zombies.

I guess there are actually two levels of reading for this book.

The first, lowest one, is focused on the action and the gore. That's OK, because the book will deliver plenty of this stuff to the avid reader.

The second, way more refined, focuses on the almost sociological aspect of the story. If you pay a close attention to what McKinney's is saying in his book, you will notice that he is painting a pretty accurate, although distressing and pathetic picture of our current society in which most of us are robots, quite immune to others' feelings and desires. On top of this, McKinney does not leave a single landmark of our civilization intact: religion will not be a solution for mankind to overcome the burden -maybe just a way of soothening the sarrow a bit. Churches are no sanctuary, they are in no way off-limits to the hords of mean, hungry, thought- and sensibility-deprived flesh eaters. The police is a futile illusion in containing the threat: they are just normal people, not better suited than others in ensuring their own survival. Technology is no cure. Friendship is an asset, but how can one distinguish friendship from a sense of interest? Beauty and appeal -women's, primarily- is no shield against the threat.

All these human-made boundaries that separate, classify and rank people between themselves in normal times are no longer of any use in a situation where civilization as a whole collapses onto itself.

Although there is almost no opening whatsoever onto the rest of the US in this book -or onto the world for that matter!!!-, no detailed explanation as to the nature and extents of the military-led solution put in place to eradicate the threat, I still think that McKinney's intent in his book has never been focused on providing that many rational, science & operations-based explanations to his readers, but rather share his view on how fragile the sociological and technological structures of our civilization are, as almighty as they might look.

I stumbled across this book at the library of all places and I couldn't put it down. Dead City is a very fast read with plenty of action, gore, and great character development. I was happy that it took a more traditional zombie route (I just can't get into the zombie animals described in some other books) and I'm looking forward to future books by Joe McKinney. I plan on adding this to my collection and I recommend other fans of the genre do so as well.