So I finally Finished Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry and I am so glad I bought it.
It’s funny how I came across this book too. Andrea and I were at Barnes and Noble one night and we were just going around looking at the genre tables. That’s when I came up with a fun game. “Find books we think the other person would enjoy”. And because I know how much Andrea enjoys bio-warfare / virus outbreak types of books, when I saw the title “Patient Zero” I thought that it would absolutely be the book for her. Of course when I picked it up and read the back cover to discover that it was a Zombie novel I realized that this was more my type of book. A few weeks later I finally gave in and bought it on Amazon.
Patient Zero, is probably one of my favorite takes on the Zombie genre, next to the Monster Trilogy by David Wellington. Unlike Monster Trilogy which uses a more paranormal ancient mystical origin, Patient Zero uses Terrorist Bio-warfare. A take on the zombie genre much different from the “gates of hell zombies just kinda happen” version of books. Patient Zero was much more reminiscent of Richard Preston’s Cobra Event and Hot Zone that dealt with engineered viruses created to terrorize the world; only without the science and history lesson chapters.
From beginning to end, the book had me anxious and fiending for more. There were a few items in the book that I wished were a little bit more obscure and mysterious rather than blatantly obvious, but they didn’t take too much away from the experience. Fight scenes and climaxes where done very well, so much so that my testosterone levels had me grunting in approval after every neck snap and bone crunch.
Although I love reading books like this, I think if this were ever to get picked up to be translated into a movie, it would be easily become one of the top zombie movies ever created.
Let me know if you want to borrow it.
Later.