Cover by Nine Worlds Media
Ragnarok dubs this book as ‘The Walking Dead and Hell on Wheels Collide.’ Those Poor, Poor Bastards is more fast paced than either of those shows, but still manages to create a cast of characters with enough personality to make the action matter. Nina, our main character, is half-Native American, with her White father her only family left alive.
Nina’s story begins with the desire to
“do something other than scavenge abandoned sites and dicker for fixins with brown-toothed backwoodsmen.”
Guess what, Nina, you’re about to get your wish, kinda. How about a demon-type zombie apocalypse that starts with horses and dogs running rampage on the small town you just entered. But, while trying to find a place to hole up, you’ll get stuck with some racist backwoodsmen.
Here’s a sample of the action to come:
A ball of fire plumed. The concussion rocked the ground. Nina felt the heat all the way to their hiding spot. Debris whizzed by, landing in the mud with thunks. The smells of charred wood, powder, and cooked horse burned her eyes. The livery office blazed; the stable roof was on fire, too.
…
“Ain’t all we got to worry about, Lincoln.”
They followed Manning’s nod, looked down the street where a dark shadow came pressing down from the west. Beneath its oppressiveness, folks ambled in the capering fog, forty or fifty strong; men and women, gunshot or hacked, afflicted with grievous wounds that should have killed them; they stood, bleeding and warped, teeth gnashing like those sick dogs and horses, a small army of persistent flesh. Some looked recently dug up, skin glowing gray in the mist, hair hanging in patches from skull-bare heads.
Nina felt sick. Her gut screamed at her to flee. “Pa. Mister Manning…”
“I’m there with ya, darlin’,” Manning said.
The three of them backed away, boots creaking on the wooden boards. Several pairs of rheumy eyes among the legion of…undead…turned their way. Nina cupped her hands over her ears as a collective moan went up.
Pa took aim, but then drew back. “Too many. Whatever the hell they are.”
Nina looked at her father. “What do we do?”
“Run,” he said.
Then two cadaverous claws broke through the store window behind James Manning and took hold of his shoulders.
The action and fear amp up from this early sample, but it is a good picture of what’s to come. The prose doesn’t get in its own way so you can fly through what happens, but still manages to keep us in Nina’s senses and fear. Looking back, she comes off as almost juvenile in this sample, which goes to show how much she’ll grow up by the time this story is finished. Her story is about keeping her older father alive, meeting people she’ll care for and hate, and discovering her spiritual gift while being skeptical of the spiritual world.
The action and plot provided enough surprises to keep me in suspense, but there is room for growth in future stories. Those Poor, Poor Bastards takes our cast of heroes into an abandoned outpost where they get surrounded by deaduns and a mystical figure who may be responsible from raising them to undead life. This semi-stationary aspect gives us time to see that the deaduns are not the only threat, and to root us in the characters we’ll cheer for and against in future books, but also gets exciting as the wave crashes over them.
Bring on The Ten Thousand Things, Marquitz, Martin and Soward. You’ve won over this reader. The Dead West can be fun!
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Timothy C. Ward
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