Sunday 20 April 2014

Review || Soulless by Christopher Golden


Soulless by Christopher Golden ★★★★☆
Times Square, New York City: The first ever mass séance is broadcasting live on the Sunrise morning show. If it works, the spirits of the departed on the other side will have a brief window -- just a few minutes -- to send a final message to their grieving loved ones.

Clasping hands in an impenetrable grip, three mediums call to their spirit guides as the audience looks on in breathless anticipation. The mediums slump over, slackjawed -- catatonic. And in cemeteries surrounding Manhattan, fragments of old corpses dig themselves out of the ground....

The spirits have returned. The dead are walking. They will seek out those who loved them in life, those they left behind...but they are savage and they are hungry. They are no longer your mother or father, your brother or sister, your best friend or lover.

They are soulless.

The horror spreads quickly, droves of the ravenous dead seeking out the living -- shredding flesh from bone, feeding. But a disparate group of unlikely heroes -- two headstrong college rivals, a troubled gang member, a teenage pop star and her bodyguard -- is making its way to the center of the nightmare, fighting to protect their loved ones, fighting for their lives, and fighting to end the madness.

Huh.

I actually really enjoyed this. More than I thought I was going to. The first little bit was kind of slow and confusing--what with being dumped right into the middle of people's lives and all that. But the book quickly hit its stride and then did not stop.

I really like ensemble casts and this book took the threads of many different stories and pulled them all together. The zombie mythos here was fresh and interesting. And downright actual-facts creepy. Some of the scenes in this book were seriously horrifying, and there was one point near the end where I wasn't actually sure if I was going to be able to read without skimming because of the gore factor.

So. Not for the faint of heart. But definitely worth a look if you're into zombies.