Customer Reviews

Happy Hour of the Damned

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

If you're like me, you've always thought that the hot, flirty action on Sex and the City was missing one essential thing: humans getting eaten by zombies. Finally, someone has breached the gap in that field of entertainment, and his name is Mark Henry.

Happy Hour of the Damned follows ad exec Amanda Feral as she adjusts to life as one of the living dead, following an unfortunate slip in a parking lot. Amanda's a sassy, no-nonsense heroine with a taste for both quality fashion and human flesh. Her friends, vampire Gil and zombie Wendy, are fantastic, and the trio provides non-stop wit and banter as they unravel the mystery of what's happened to a missing friend.

Mark's easy writing style captures Amanda's voice perfectly and makes this urban fantasy book hard to put down. If you like your humor a little dark and twisted, you've come to the right place--and you'll never look at Starbucks the same way again.

In case you missed it above:

"Gruesome, ghoulish and utterly groundbreaking. Mark Henry is daring and scathingly funny." --Jackie Kessler

I really, really enjoyed this book. It's dark and macabre, and seriously twisted -- which in my world makes it damn near perfect. Amanda isn't your average heroine. She's unapologetically biting -- both in her humor and her food choices -- and she's got a brutal fashion sense and a fine appreciation for booze. What makes the story really work for me is that Amanda is more than a well-dressed vehicle for a scathing one-liner: she changes over the course of the book. She grows, bless her dead little heart.

Like I said, the humor is dark. If EVIL DEAD is your thing, I bet you'll love this book.

Another day, another book read. Today's review is about a new book by Mark Henry a fellow Seattleite. Amazingly enough the book is set in Seattle as well. Ok not amazing, but cool none the less! Happy Hour of the Damned is an urban fantasy about modern day and oh so hip celebrity ghoul (read zombie) Amanda Feral and her adventures as one of Seattle's newly undead. You really have to admit Feral is a perfect last name for a zombie!

Let me start by saying that zombies are really not my thing, and more than once felt myself fighting back a dry heave, upon reading some of the flesh eating, putrefying commentary. There was a line about a guy munching on an ear like a potato chip that almost did me in LOL. Give me a vampire and a little blood sucking any day! Pus and exploding bowels...not so much. It gives the phrase "no it doesn't taste like chicken" a whole new meaning. Thankfully there are also vampires, werewolves, and a few succubi involved in the storyline. Despite my initial squeamishness, I dug in and really got into this groovy tale.

I think none of you will be surprised that Starbuck's is featured and is at the center of a plot for global destruction. I commented to Mark that I would never look at bucky's the same after reading this great book. Our local Safeway barista really has an undead look to her gaze. <shudder>

Amanda is a hip and sassy undead fashionista with a skin care regimen to make Liz Taylor proud. Really, even I learned some things from her!

This book was a slower read for me than usual. for the most part I can knock out a book in just a few hours. One thing that is different that slowed me down were a lot of footnotes. Pretty much on every page. But these weren't your regular footnotes denoting resources, but a running commentary on whatever was going on. So, you have to read them to get the deeper nuances of some of the humor Mark presents. Since my normal Ellen Woodhead Sped Redding course mode of reading so fast I barely see the pages move wasn't working, I found myself forgetting the footnotes and then remembering and having to go back. It isn't critical that you read them, but they definitely add another dimension.

The humor presented in this book is definitely scathing and razor sharp. I pride myself on being fairly quick witted (no commentary from the Peanut Gallery needed thank you very much), but even I missed a few things that were thrown in, only to realize later what I had missed. So, it was good for a fun read, during and after. I am still chuckling about a few things. Plus I have a few new cocktail recipes to boot!

While I won't be going out and digging up (ha ha) any new sources of Zombie reading material, I cannot WAIT for the next installment in the Amanda Feral chronicles "Road Trip of the Living Dead".

Reviewed at Bitten by Books Paranormal Fiction Review Site by Rachel
The Bitten by Books review score for this book was 4.5 Tombstones

Notice that most of the other reviews are from really highly ranked, strong selling fantasy authors? That says a lot about the quality of this book. It's not only a fun read, but it's a well-crafted fantasy world that would be great to inhabit, except for the flesh-eating divas.

The only thing I've thought those two words had in common was the starting letter, but "Happy Hour of the Damned" has convinced me that yes, footnotes can be funny.

There are 132 footnotes in "Happy Hour's" 290 pages. Before that scares you off, they cover everything from undead abbreviations (USO: Unknown Supernatural Origin) to explaining that an 'my eyes mid-roll' is "standard operating procedure for show of irritability." They range from "don't have anything in your mouth when you're reading them" to "oh, why did I stop reading the wonderful narrative to look?"

Footnotes are just the tip of the iceberg of what makes "Happy Hour" different. Mark Henry's also included drink recipes and playlists in exhibit frames on several pages.

Bluntly, this should NOT work, but it does. There's everything here to distract you from the narrative. Amanda is both learning how to be a zombie and trying to find a lost succubus, named Liesl. The zombie lessons include such things as what not to eat--just about anything but booze, which really isn't a problem since alcoholism runs in the family--to how to spackle yourself back together when your undead skin's been damaged.

We've also got delightfully labeled flashbacks, occasional lists (OCD much?) and strange twists and turns in abundance. But, Henry's timing is exquisite--just when you're about to get totally lost, he throws you a bone and sucks you back into the main plot.

Amanda Feral is your typical catty, clothes and cars conscious, self-involved chick lit heroine who tripped on a donut box that she tossed away for someone else to pick up and died. (God I love poetic justic, don't you?) She was so twisted in life, she was having a delicious affair with her therapist, Martin Allende. There's about as much character development as you'd expect, the reviewer says with her tongue firmly planted in cheek.

As other reviewers have stated, this book is HILARIOUS, but it's an acquired taste. Readers with a weak stomach should not apply! If you love totally twisted far out horror film humor, you will get more than a happy hour reading this book.

Don't judge this book by it's cover........Clearly the art department had a few too many sips from Amanda's Pimp Cup. I could not put this book down! Snarky, Quick, Urban Poetry. I think this is the wittiest comedy in disguise I have ever read. I can't wait for more undead antics. LOVED LOVED LOVED IT!!!!!!!!!!!!! More Please!

There's a lot of flaws in this book, but for all of them -- a flashback that would have worked better if it had been broken up into segments and paced throughout the book, more expletives than was really necessary, a mystery plot that gets itself lost -- the characters are a riot! Amanda Feral, the foul-mouthed fashionista turned ghoul debutante, makes me, by turns, want to blow her empty little ghoul head off with a "boom-stick", and laugh out loud at her quips.

This is definately urban fantasy chick lit, or a playful satire of chick lit. Jim Butcher's "Dresden Files" it isn't, so come prepared for a froofy plot with a lot of naughty innuendo, ghoulish black comedy and gleeful gruesomeness. The world-building is what really saves this book: who'd 've thunk sexy zombies might lurk in our midst, clubbing crazy-themed clubs with their fellow preternaturals?

Spent reading this book. It reads like a cross between Sex & the City and the Dresden Files, deftly mixing supernatural horror with hilarity and gossip-blog style catty bitchiness. The book had me hooked from the get-go; highly recommend it.

When recommending the book to everyone I encountered--I shambled toward them with my arms out, saying, "Reeeead, reeeeead!"--I described it as "undead chick lit written by a straight dude." It's fantastic. My suspension of disbelief stretched a few times, like creaky ligaments in a zombie body, but it never quite snapped like bones between Amanda's monster jaws. This story is clever, hilarious, and snarkgasmic.

When I'm elderly to the point of undead, rotting piece by piece in a nursing home where they mistreat me and lie to my kids about how well I'm doing, and I've forgotten my own name, I'm STILL going to remember the stripper. You'll know what I'm talking about when you get there.

This is the funniest book I have ever read. In the fine tradition of Christopher Moore's Blood Sucking Fiends, Amanda Feral has to learn how to deal with her new undead lifestyle. Amanda's trials are hysterical. I thought I was going to break something laughing.

Mark you are one sick puppy. I cannot wait for Road Trip of the Damned.