Henry spent eight years chained to a post. Exposed, starved, infected with the December Plague, and mad. During those eight years, the December Plague consumed most of the world’s human population, causing the infected to become violent and cannibalistic.
But Henry escaped. And now he’s been Cured. He vividly remembers what has been done to him and others. He can also recall the terrible things he did while he was infected. He and his fellow survivors face a world unlike anything they knew before. They are weak, lost and completely alone. Now released from both the madness of the Plague and the cruelty of their captors, they must decide which is more important: survival or revenge.
The Cured is a standalone novel in the world of After the Cure.
"What happens if you recover from being a zombie. An excellent concept which falls short of what it could have been. "
Reviewer: Angel for Bookangel.
What would happen if you became a zombie for several years and then recovered? How would you come to terms with what you had done? This is the difficult situation that Henry and his companions finds themselves in. Cured from a plague along with another group of zombies, they struggle to reconcile their past lives with the present as they remember what they did and what was done to them. Set in a world where the zombie plague has devastated the world and reduced it to a few pockets of civilisation, we follow their struggle to find one of these pockets and live with their memories, especially when their past comes back to haunt them.
The concept for this novel is excellent, not the plague and zombies, but the aftermath. What if you woke up afterwards and could remember in detail every single moment of the last few years, every person you killed, every action you took while unable to do anything about it. The world is believable, from the decaying areas to the City that is standing as the main hope in the area to protecting those who survived. Within the City those humans still alive - both the Immunes and the Cured - are forced to live together regardless of what acts might have been committed by either side as they try to create a new civilisation.
The biggest problem with this novel is that anything which could have been of interest is exposition. It is understandable that the characters memories would be done this way, but it has been expanded to everything. You hear about how world is, but you never really see it. All the characters are told about things that occur, but little of it ever happens to them. What is there is well-written, but there is no feeling that the characters are part of this world, but just passing through it somehow.
If you are looking for a Sci-Fi novel with a great concept and are willing to just follow the characters along, you will probably enjoy this book, but if you are looking for something which actually tackles the problems that could arise and makes you think, you will probably feel hungry for something else by the end of the tale. Rating:3
"Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover: in this case, the cover is good, the book is very, very, good."
Reviewer: Reader for Bookangel.
Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. In this case, the cover is good, and the book is very, very, good.
I started this for what should have been a fifteen minute break. Two hours later I put it down, wondering where the evening had gone. I'm not going to talk about the formatting or grammar, since the story got me so hooked I neither noticed nor cared. The characters are realistic and well-written, the story gripping and the plot that rarest of things - original!
On the surface this seems like a standard zombie apocalypse story: a virus infects the majority of the population turning them into cannibalistic mindless zombies. It takes it a step further: once a cure is found and used, what happens next? The story is told from the point of view of a former debt-collector and now-cured zombie, through infection, madness and then the new world afterwards. PTSD, criminal trials, tension between the infected and immune and more all ratchet up the tension nicely. This isn't an outright gore-fest: most of the horror is psychological and the more disturbing because of it.
I've actually recommended this to another reviewer. It's that good.
Lovers of horror, thrillers, post-apocalyptic fiction, and - of course - zombies, should read this now.
2 reviews:
What happens if you recover from being a zombie? An excellent concept which falls short of what it could have been...
*Continue reading...*
...Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover: in this case, the cover is good, the book is very, very, good....
*Continue reading...*
I like the morality questions that we are forced to ask ourselves while reading. I became engrossed in the characters, so the moral aspects of this story became mine as well.
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