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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
When everyone died, it was only the beginning of the nightmare ..., March 11, 2009
In a sudden apocalyptic event with no warning, 99% of the world's population dies - instantly. For the 1% who survive, the inexplicable deaths of everyone around them and their new isolation in a dead world are like a nightmare. But forty-eight hours later, the nightmare gets worse when the dead rise and begin to walk. Attracted to light and sound, the mindless zombies instinctively kill any living thing they find.
Sunset is a novel narrating the experiences of several intriguing survivors in various regions of the U.S. - a twenty-something failure-to-launch who worked at a video store in Kansas, a computer programmer enjoying a vacation in Las Vegas, a retired cop in New York City, and a terrorist who was just about to blow up a building, along with himself and thousands of other people, before something pre-empted his act. (I thought it was rather daring to include this character in his line up.) As the survivors come out of their own personal shock and begin to seek other survivors, they find that the living can be more dangerous than the dead.
Given an event that destroys the fabric of civilized society, the violent and immoral individuals immediately rise up and begin to destroy those people still clinging to an illusion of law and order. The mindless zombies are little threat composed to the predatory living humans who have taken up arms against fellow survivors. Although I found Sunset an interesting book, this particular aspect stretched my credibility. One would think that the instinct for species survival would prevent most people from shooting other survivors on sight. I wanted a little more background from the author on this behavior, and I felt that the plot of the book suffered because it was not there.
Sunset is appropriate for adult audiences who enjoy horror, zombies, and stories of a post-apocalyptic world.
Reviewed by Dianne Salerni
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not your typical Zombie novel, December 26, 2008
I am not a regular reader of horror fiction and would start by saying this is not what I expected from a horror fiction novel. It is set in a world where 98% of the population has been turned into flesh-craving zombies. I expected the book to focus on the survivor's battle against this enemy like so many other zombie-based books or movies do. But, in fact, the author takes this story in a pleasingly different direction. Although the nightly appearance of the zombies plays a significant role throught the story, the zombies become a much less menacing foe to the survivors as the survivors in the story begrudgingly face the reality that they need to turn their energies to protecting themselves from their true antagonist, other survivors. It becomes a story about the struggle of "good" survivors against the brutal tactics of other non-zombified humans who were also spared by the apocalyptic catastrophe that occurred. The story is written from the persective of 3 different survivors and takes you into their approach to living day-to-day in this new world. The author presents two opposing ideas about survival when facing the aftermath of an apocalyptic event and what living in a world without law and order means to different types of people all of whom are facing an uncertain future. Very descriptive with an astute attention to details. The ending left me hoping that a sequel will soon follow
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Borderline Awful, January 20, 2010
This review is from: Sunset (Kindle Edition)
It's even tough to tag this one, because we get another case of an author abusing the "zombie" concept. Bottom-line: this is mostly the tale of vile humans abusing others trying to survive an unexplained apocalypse.
Inexplicably set in 1991 (though published in 2008) this tale of four survivors (three at first, another is introduced half-way through) meanders in tone and detail as well as style. For no discernible reason two of the survivors get to tell their tale in the first-person, while the other two are covered in the third. The narrative jumps between the various survivors and roughly aligns the time period but other guessing there is no way to verify that since chunks of time are often thrown off in backstory recollections. The three characters introduced at the start are a 20-year-old slacker (whose personality gets some attention through the first-person narrative at the very beginning), a nebbishy 40-year-old vacationing computer programmer and a despicable terrorist. While some reviewers seem to find this last choice interesting or bold it is quite horrendous especially given that he is the other character granted a first-person view. Later a retired New York City cop enters the switching narrative. The choice of changing the perspective of the story rarely works and fails utterly here, and usually the book reads as three separate stories that on a whim the author decided to link together rather than a cogent narrative style.
About the "Zombies": I will once again grant that there is no one type of zombie, but the dead that are afraid of the daylight yet are drawn to fire? Other reviewers toss out 99% and 98% as the percent of the world's population that has died. While there is no word of any country other than the U.S., I'd peg it at more like 99.9999% of the population dead. In an instant. And they lie around dead for a while and then "disappear". The "zombies" are more of a concern than a threat here, they are the more standard slow and awkward time, and the fact that they retreat in the day time removes most of their "bite", not that biting ever takes place here.
A note about the Kindle version: it appears the author just dumped a text file. While there is occasional new paragraph indentation mostly everything just runs together, their are odd shifts in justification, duplicated lines, section headings blended into paragraphs and other formatting errors. It doesn't make the book any more difficult to read, but it looks awful.
Page after page of boring description of surroundings and inventory made me want to file this one away before finishing but I just couldn't. There are no real action scenes or tension as most of the confrontations with the "bad guys" just come out of nowhere and the protagonists are taken off guard. The usual military bunker and search for food tropes are here, and a few intriguing concepts keep this from being a one-star for me, but I didn't care about any of the characters and other than the ridiculous everyone-drops-dead-instantly premise Sunset brings nothing new to the table and once again I was burned in my quest for zombie fiction.
If you're just out of options in a quest to read anything tangentially tied to zombie fiction I will understand your suffering through this book. But I refuse to tag it "zombies": what zombie would be afraid of the daylight hours?
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