Book Review: Monster Planet by David Wellington

After thoroughly enjoying the first two books in the Monster series, I can't believe how disappointed I was in David Wellington's Monster Planet. This book was published in June 2007. As the conclusion to what should have been an awesome trilogy, I had to force myself through the book just because I felt obligated after having read the first two superior novels. Monster Island and Monster Nation were great, but I felt like this book was a mess.

This series of books is about zombies, but it is not your typical George A. Romero mindless zombie thriller. It puts a major spin on the zombie genre by having some of them be very intelligent, and there are a lot of supernatural elements to the story. In the first book, Monster Island, one guy hooked himself up to oxygen right before dying and coming back as a zombie, but the oxygen helped keep his brain tissue from decaying so he ended up being the zombie leader. The second book, Monster Nation, is a prequel to the first one and attempts to explain how the zombie holocaust began.

Twelve years separate the events in this book from the original book. Now, it describes a world where humans are minimal and zombies are all over the place. It even brings in an ancient Egyptian mummy to help run the show. The plot has two main storylines that begin together, then run independently of each other for almost the entire book before things come back together in the end. Each story focuses on a character who is stuck in a bad situation and they are looking for each other while the rest of the world is basically collapsing around them.

The problem I had with this book is that it suffers from major sequelitis. There's just too much going on and the author went overboard with the amount of supernatural elements he threw in. Sure, it does make for an original story, but I thought he went too far out of bounds from his original plotline. I also thought that the two main storylines, and the characters at the center of them, just weren't all that interesting. I never got emotionally invested enough in each character to care what happened to them or where they were going, which is a big part of the reason I had trouble even finishing the book.

Zombie fans will at least enjoy the action and violence, though it seems to be a lot more toned down from the two previous stories. In this book, the characters are both going through a journey where all the chaos is in the background. While the book is pretty gory, I wouldn't call it very action-packed, at least not until the end.

I'm sure some folks out there will enjoy Monster Planet a lot more than I did. I really did like the first two books, but I wish I hadn't wasted my time pushing through this one.