You have to give Victor Gischler credit - he starts
Go Go Girls of the Apocalypse with a bang. The main character, Mortimer Tate, has been hiding for 9 years in a cave in rural Tennessee, as the world spirals down into utter chaos. The first three humans that he sees in that time end up dead, and his adventure begins.
Unlike most disaster/apocalyptic novels, Go Go Girls doesn’t have a single cause to the apocalypse. Instead, the world lurches from disaster to disaster, finally melting down into the familiar post-apocalyptic landscape that we all know and love. While this is happening, the hero - Mort - is hiding in a cave in the backwoods of Tennessee from his soon-to-be-ex wife. He gets a ringside seat to the meltdown via radio, but batteries soon burn out and he hunkers down to wait for the screaming to stop.
Nine years later, three men show up, scouting around his refuge, and end up dead. This gets Mort thinking, and he decides to rejoin what’s left of the human race. Unfortunately, Mort seems to be fairly clueless. He’s not a quick learner, and is immediately captured & tortured for the wonderful things he’s carrying. Conveniently, his captor is confronted by a fellow survivor, dressed as a cowboy. The captor ends up dead, the cowboy ( who calls himself Buffalo Bill) turns out to be a decent fellow, and Mort has a guide in the scary new world.
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You know, I never really thought that much about music and how it ties into the apocalypse. The one exception being The Stand when it was made into a TV miniseries: it introduced me to
Don’t Fear the Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult and reminded me of how much I love
Don’t Dream it’s Over by Crowded House. (Seriously, I know the miniseries was cheese, but I loved it, and those two songs in particular did a fabulous job of promoting the creep factor in the first 2 hours.)
But now, apparently, there’s an whole entire book devoted to dissecting apocalyptic themes in popular music: Apocalypse Jukebox: The End of the World in American Popular Music by Edward Whitelock and David Janssen. Who knew?
Brief product description:
“From its indefinite beginnings through its broad commercialization and endless reinterpretation, American rock-and-roll music has been preoccupied with an end-of-the-world mentality that extends through the whole of American popular music. In Apocalypse Jukebox, Edward Whitelock and David Janssen trace these connections through American music genres, uncovering a mix of paranoia and hope that characterizes so much of the nation’s history.”
More details on Amazon.
I’m not actually a big fan of zombies.
I’ve never seen a Romero film (too gory); in point of fact I think I’ve only ever seen two zombie movies end-to-end and that’s Shaun of the Dead and Resident Evil: Extinction (both still too gory for my wussy tastes). Unless, of course, watching Michael Jackson’s Thriller counts. In which case I’ve seen three.
It’s not just the gore, either. Zombies are just so… predictable. Oh look. They’re walking really slow and rotting! Oooooh. Scary. I didn’t think they’d make a very good apocalypse.
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks was my first ever zombie novel. I was a complete zombie apocalypse virgin. I have to say that the book has completely turned upside down my expectations from zombie lit. So much so that I’m faced with a dilemma:
Start reading all kinds of zombie apocalypse lit, because it’s such a great example, or never read another zombie book again… because nothing else could possibly measure up?
Max Brooks’ writing is that good.
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Year Zero starts off with a bang. Actually, with a rumble, and crash in Jerusalem, in the aftermath of a magnitude 9.1 earthquake. We are introduced to two of the more important characters of the book - Nathan Lee, a young archeology student, and David Ochs, his mentor, and a shady character at best, who are on their way to loot bones from a crypt underneath a church in the city.
After establishing the relationship between them, the scene shifts, and we meet the precocious Miranda - a seventeen year old over the top genius, who offhandedly solves not just one, but several problems in the field of cloning, all in an attempt to put one over on her absent father.
In between these two scenes, we are shown the origins of a worldwide plague. Apparently, some of the “Year Zero” artifacts included vials of blood, and these have been sold to an unscrupulous collector of antiquities, who is searching for the bones of Jesus. One of these artifacts contains a virus that is released when the collector opens the two thousand year old artifact to do genetic mapping on the blood inside.
The description of the plague is interesting. It has some similarities to a zombie infestation - and we all know how much fun THOSE are. Victims lose their ability to think, stop taking care of themselves, and slowly turn transparent. Eventually, they starve to death, but not before infecting everyone that touches them. They don’t show any agressive tendencies, so one wonders how the plague spreads, once the realities of the plague are known.
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