On not disappointing your audience

Jack asked me to post up some more quotes from the atrocity that is ‘Zombie Apocalypse!’ I have nothing better to do, so why not? Probably violating some kind of copyright laws here, but, in my defence, the book is so bad it simply must be shared. I’m not saying that I’m by any means a better writer, but I hope I never bring readers joy by how shit my words are. This coming from a man who has still not finished an absurd and ludicrous horror story about Pokemon.

A transcript of a Mexican radio station’s final broadcast:

ERNESTO NERUDA:
Carlos, what’s that sound? Can you see any zombies tied up by the Tepitenos?

CARLOS VILLA:
Doesn’t look like it. Wait! I’ve been spotted. This looks bad.
[sound of scuffling and chairs being overturned and Villa’s voice rises to a terrifying crescendo]
They’re all dead, they’re all dead, they’re all dead! Not a single person alive! All dead, all dead, all dead, dead, dead, dead…
[Villa screams repeatedly]

ERNESTO NERUDA:
Get out of there, Carlos! Can you hear me? Get out of there!

CARLOS VILLA:
La Flaca! La Flaca! Oh Thin Lady, have mercy! Have mercy!

An Australian flying doctor who has been force-fed cooked zombie flesh and spent the past eight pages whinging about the experience, on not wanting to eat an apple:

-Oh god. I hate to admit this. But what I feel like, what I crave deep down in my belly, is meat. Zombie flesh. I guess I’ll have to go out and hunt.

A text message conversation between a woman and her ex:

Mike: Jane.

Jane: Mike!! You’re alive! That firestorm, like the end of the world, I thought you must be dead!

Mike: thort so 2

Jane: I’m trapped, don’t know what to do. Soldiers gone from street. Just zombies out there now – must have crossed river

Jane: I’ve got to stop crying, they’ll hear me. There was one… a fucking clown, can you believe that?

Jane: That fire, that explosion. All for nothing. They crossed [the river]. What now? Same for us?

Jane: And the fleas. Millions of fleas, everywhere.

Mike: they don’t itch

Jane: ?

Mike: U look tastee

The final entry in a parlimentary meeting between two people, written and recorded by ‘Millie’:

Sir Kenneth: Millie, what are you doing? Don’t eat that. It’s disturbing. Millie? You’re still writing, so… no, Millie, don’t eat those. Millie…

A serious newspaper item, before the outbreak really kicks off:

‘CRAZED MOURNERS have dug up the body of Princess Diana from its final resting place in her ancestral home and reburied her in the New Festival of Britain site in South London – in a bid to re-animate her decades-dead corpse.’

The above bit is written by a character who, in the chronology of events, was killed at least a day or two before it went to print. Ummm… What a great novel that was. Good old ‘Zombie Apocalypse!’

There are so many ‘classic’ moments in here, but some of them are far too long. There’s the elderly lady who, dispite writing in a prim and proper style with hintings of upper class education and all the trimmings, constantly uses the word ‘fuck’ in her letters. Or the doctor who is bitten on the arm, passes out for two days, wakes up feeling fine and then chooses to finish his report on his dead patient. Or the blogger who gets a cut on his chin from shattered glass and then becomes a zombie and leaves a final post wher he states his intention to eat everyone else left alive.

We’ll close on probably my favourite quotes, all from the second chapter. They’re my favourites because it was here, just twenty pages into the book, that I realised I’d been ripped off and that I could find better fiction online. Written by infants. With no concept of language. Living on a different planet.

A transcript of a female journalist talking to herself in her PDA, while she knowingly breaks into a secure government digging site:

‘I was kind odf hoping he’d stick around because it’s bloody dark and I’m wearing heels. Not high ones, but the ground is really rough.’

‘I can see mechanical diggers lined in a long row like huge yellow beetles.’

‘He thinks this is where they took the bodies, although if they did they cleaned up afterwards as the floor here looks like it was recently washed down, and I can smell disinfectant. Yes, there are puddles of the stuff all over the floor. I’m wearing Marc Jacobs shoes because I was out at dinner earlier. What an idiot.’

‘Just so you don;t worry, I’ve put on an anti-bacterial facemask, like Japanese girls wear. I got it from someone on the travel desk. Not that I think there’s anything down here to worry about.’

‘Christ. There’s something in here – it moved really fast, just across the back of the camera frame. Okay, I’ll just fire off the flash.’

And probably the greatest line in the whole book:

‘Just for the record, if anyone gets to hear this, my friend Margaret is is coming towards me, and I think she intends to drain me of blood in order to feed her parasites. She’s cold and dead, but the fleas are keeping her alive so that she can feast on others.’

Of course, any of the writers who I’ve quoted here are perfectly at liberty to simply reply back ‘Well, where’s YOUR name in a book, you little bastard?’ Touche, writer. Touche.

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