Review! Xombies: Apocalypticon by Walter Greatshell

Xombies: Apocalypticon
Walter Greatshell
Ace
February 23, 2010
ISBN-10: 0441018459
ISBN-13: 978-0441018451

XOMBIES: APOCALYPTICON is the continuing saga of the USS No-Name, an Ohio-Class submarine converted to a refugee vessel during the worldwide plague of "Agent X"--a disease that changes women into raving, homicidal Typhoid Marys.

Leading the fight to survive are Dr. Alice Langhorne, whose research helped spawn the plague; Commander Harvey Coombs, Navy captain minus a navy; Sal DeLuca, BMX champ facing the ultimate Xtreme sport; and troubled teenager Lulu Pangloss, who died and was born again.

Facing off against them are mutinous shipmates, yoga-crazed prison convicts, hostile mercenaries...and the all-encompassing threat of the Xombies themselves.

In Xombies: Apocalypticon, we meet a band of stranded humans living in a submarine after civilization was asphyxiated by blue-skinned devils. When Agent X came about, it infected first women then moved on to men and as it quickly spread worldwide, not many survived. At least that's what the people in that 560-foot steel tomb thought until they see a fire burning along an Eastern shore. These survivors, including Sal DeLuca, a boy who lost his dad to Agent X, have barely any food left and are slowly starving to death. To make matters worse, there's some people in the submarine who don't like how it's being commanded and they're about to take matters into their own hands.

Sal and a bunch of other boys are forced to go into land to look for food, no matter that to send a band of unarmed boys is pretty much a suicide mission against the Xombies but they're forced to go. However, they find more than just food but dozens of men who have not only survived but also have found a way to fight the Xombies. At first, it seems to Sal as these men have a pretty sweet life set up but soon enough, he finds there's more to the eye than eating all the junk food he wants and getting trashed, there's a dark underlying current under all the fun and games and Sal and the boys left are about to find out it's not only the Xombies they should worry about.

Xombies: Apocalypticon is the sequel to Xombies: Apocalypse Blues and I must give it credit for originality. While the Xombies in this book kind of remind me of the ones in Dawn of the Dead, they are wicked fast! the way Greatshell writes them is really creative. I'd always said that if the zombie apocalypse comes, I really hope the zombies aren't fast or I would be one of the first ones to die. In the first quarter of this story, I was hooked. The description of the Xombies is so well written that at times I was a bit scared. Yet somehow along the way, and I honestly can't exactly said when or how it happened, this story turned psychotic. It stopped making any sort of sense and the ending was a huge "What the hell was that?" moment for me. I can say that the only thing that kept me reading was morbid curiosity. It was like a horrible car crash, I simply could not look away. So, if Greatshell was looking to hooked the reader in a horrified kind of way, then he's more than succeeded in my case! 

While the description was excellent and I was strangely hooked on finding out what was going to happen next, I was left with more questions than answers and honestly, I'm not really interested in reading the next book in this series. I like reading about and watching movies that feature zombies but I'm afraid these Xombies just didn't do it for me.

Lush Rating: 2!