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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Undead and Loving It, October 11, 2008
This review is from: Soulless (Paperback)
It was supposed to be controlled. It was supposed to be a seance led by the nation's three top mediums, televised for the masses. It was supposed to be a way for the living to get some closure, to move on after speaking to their loved ones who had passed on. It wasn't supposed to raise the dead.
It did.
The corpses that rise from their graves are not compassionate, nor are gentle. They are violent, hungry, and soulless. They are intent on getting home, and will attack anyone that gets in their way. Meanwhile, those directly involved in the seance - the mediums and the two newsanchors - have sunk into a comatose state. Their hands are firmly grasped together, and nothing and no one can separate them.
Christopher Golden's return to young adult fiction ought to be celebrated. Earlier this year, Poison Ink seeped into the brains of readers. Now, the zombies in Soulless seek to feast on those brains, and those who dare to fight the undead may not live to speak of the tale.
I'll speak for them instead. After all, I've been talking about this book non-stop since I finished reading it.
I highly recommend Soulless to fans of horror movies and novels. It is far and away the best of the many zombie-themed books that came out in 2008. Soulless is so action-packed that I've taken to calling it a movie bound in a book. From the start of the ill-fated seance to its bitter end, the pacing never falters. The main characters - including the daughter of one of the mediums, a couple of college students, and a pop singer whose personal business is often splashed across the cover of tabloids - weave in and out of each other's journeys with ease and overlapping storylines. The book's action sequences and rise of average people and headstrong teens as leaders in the fight will appeal to fans of Heroes.
Of course, all good zombie stories have violence, decay, and destruction, and Soulless has all of that without ever being gory for gore's sake. It raised not only the dead, but many thought-provoking questions: Do we want to see our loved ones again after they pass away? If they return as zombies, unlike their living selves, would they be better left to rest in peace?
With its wide variety of characters, overlapping stories, and fast-paced plotting, Soulless will appeal to teens of both genders and throughout the teen age. Golden's third-person narrative permits the reader to get inside the minds of the various leading characters, who represent different socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnicities, even orientations - but all have a common goal, to bring this crisis to an end, and that is why their crossing-of-paths is inevitable and enjoyable. There's more to this book than meets the eye: it will hook readers with its eerie plotline and keep them turning pages due to the action and great writing, but all the while, it will really make them think. With its exploration of life and death, fear and family, love and loss, Soulless is a memorable book sure to inspire weighty conversations between readers. With its many twists and turns, Soulless will also keep you guessing. Trust me - You'll devour this book in one sitting. I know I did.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A surprisingly gory and horrific young adult novel, April 9, 2010
This review is from: Soulless (Paperback)
Phoenix Cormier was never really close to her father. She's trying to make up for lost time and try to get to know him better by spending the summer with him. However, her father is a medium and writes books about ghosts, which consumes his life. She goes with him to a TV appearance where he and two other mediums are going to perform the biggest seance in history and allow viewers and audience members to contact the dead. This endeavor goes awry and leaves the three mediums plus the two TV hosts in a trance and unable to be moved. Plus the dead from the entire east coast has risen, hungry and longing for their loved ones. Follow Phoenix, two rival college students, a teen pop princess, and a gang banger as they battle to survive and stop the zombie apocalypse.
This book was a big surprise to me. As a young adult horror novel, I expected to see tame zombies with a minimum of violence and gore, like many YA zombie books. I was completely wrong. This is as gory if not more so than many adult horror novels I have read. Christopher Golden pushes the envelope with extreme zombie violence and bloody deaths. These zombies are unlike anything I have seen before. They are rotting corpses, but since they are reanimated essentially by magic, they are not limited by their deteriorated bodies. They can sprint (while making sense, unlike the Romero type zombies). They also evolve mentally to be able to set traps and lure their loved ones with actual memories from the deceased person. These aspects make these zombies so much scarier than their garden variety counterparts.
The characters were all believable and different in their reactions to the crumbling civilization around them. Most of the main characters were teens, which made for an interesting read. Most books like this are adult and focus on adults. I have never really seen the point of view of a teen in this sort of situation. It's similar to other novels in that they have to do horrible things for the greater good, get used to seeing and killing the undead, and try to figure out what actions they can live with in this savage world. The change in the characters from before the zombie apocalypse to after was engaging and interesting to read. This book has all I hope for in any horror novel.
I really like this novel. The only problem I had with it was that the ending seemed a little too rushed. It could easily have been 50 pages longer without dragging. I hope I get to see more of this type of horror from the young adult genre.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
fast-paced fun, November 7, 2008
This review is from: Soulless (Paperback)
I liked the premise of Soulless a lot. A mass seance on an early morning television show designed to reconnect the living with the spirits of their long lost loved ones for a few moments goes horribly wrong and awakens the dead. The dead are HUNGRY! For the FLESH! Of the LIVING! And a bunch of people with nothing in common wind up trying to survive the outbreak of flesh-eating corpses and ultimately end it, together.
This was my introduction to Christopher Golden and it was pretty great. All in all, I had a lot of fun reading Soulless. The book moves along at a really nice clip. Even the brief moments in which the characters pause to catch their breath as they outrun the dead move quickly. Whenever I put this book down, I wanted to pick it back up again.
And speaking of characters, there are a variety of them here. The novel has multiple POVs and Golden uses them to great effect. He doesn't look at the zombie apocalypse the same way twice; each character begins with firmly set personalities, differing ideas and beliefs and watching all of these things crumble as the pages go by is fantastic and fascinating. I particularly enjoyed experiencing the horror through the eyes of Tania, a Disney-type star dealing with a tabloid scandal, and Phoenix, whose formerly absent father is at the heart of the seance.
NOW. Let's talk zombies because that's what we're all here for. The zombies in Soulless have a bit of a twist that I found really neat: they're specifically targeting their loved ones. How fantastically creepy to think that if someone you love has died, they'll be seeking you out to eat you, as opposed to your every day, non-discriminating zombies.
But don't let all the fun fool you--Soulless doesn't shy away from the troubling moral conundrums that arise when the dead arise. There is a neat, ghostly thread throughout the book about the separation of spirit and soul; your soul is pure and moves on after death and your spirit is the desperate, saddest part of you that stays behind--your ghost. This is the foundation of Golden's dead and it offers much to contemplate. So not only is Soulless fast-paced and full of action, it's a thoughtful, well-rounded horror story as well.
Check it out!
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