The Book: The Rising Horde

The Author: Stephen Knight

The Story: In Volume in of The Rising Horde, the zombie apocalypse sweeps through the United States, and Special Forces operators Cord McDaniels and David Gartrell are once again thrown together – like it or not.

Their mission is to protect a Texas laboratory struggling to develop an anti-necromorph vaccine before the entire country goes under! McDaniels has the vast might of the U.S. military at his disposal, but as millions of stenches march on the fortified laboratory, he begins to doubt whether it’s enough!

The race is on! For the dead have risen… and the living scream!

Review by Seattle Eric: First off, read The Gathering Dead and Left for Dead before reading this two tome sequel. To fully enjoy The Rising Horde, it’s important to live through the hell that McDaniels and Gartrell went through in NYC. It establishes these two critical characters, and sets them up to be explored further in these volumes.

Much like the first books, your mind will gradually assemble the main set piece of The Rising Horde. In other words, you’ll visualize your own version of SPARTA as the action builds over the course of the book. Stephen Knight has the skill (much like Matthew Reilly) of describing a place so viscerally, that you feel part of the action throughout. The scrub of the Texas desert, the array of defenses built around the ersatz office park, the blooms of the *hundreds* of powerful explosions that literally rock the emptiness (well, empty save for the zombies) surrounding the proverbial Alamo in this book.

The military jargon can be intimidating, and I found myself Bing’ing many of the aircraft and various weaponry so as to better visualize the action, but the vast array of materiel becomes another character itself.

There are plenty of secondary and terciary characters (mostly military) that are just interesting enough to keep track of, but the heart of this book are Cord and Gartrell. You care about them (and the fate of their families), and want them to make it.

Then there are the zombies, stenches, zeds, necromorphs – simply horrifying. Millions of them having been turned from their former human selves and are headed straight into the path of our heroes. Nothing stops their need to feed. Interestingly, Knight has explained, via one of his scientist characters, why the zombies won’t roam the earth forever. It turns out even zombies can’t keep walking indefinitely.

All in all, a very satisfying work of zombie fiction. I’m a huge fan of Knight’s work (check out City of the Damned and White Tiger), and hope he finds success beyond his wildest dreams – he deserves it!

The Book: Wolf’s Rise

The Author: Sevastian Winters

The Story: The military thought they were making the perfect weapon. Unfortunately for them, they were right!

Werewolves meet the Bourne Identity in Volume I of this adrenaline packed LupoSapien Project series.

Review by Donald Pennington: What is written fiction, if not escape from the everyday, the dreary and the mundane? Wolf’s Rise is an adventure into a world where the rest of us will not go.

And we join the characters on an adventure which we’ll never risk. Sevastian does a decent job walking us through the excitement. Look. you’ll spend more on less entertainment in life. Support this new guy.

Review by Summer Banks: The popularity of werewolf stories has taken a sharp upturn in recent years, but Wolf’s Rise offers a new take on an old favorite. The characters blend seamlessly and the author manages to connect tons of small details to the cliffhanger of an ending. The only drawback is the editing. There are spelling errors, missing quotations and arbitrarily capitalized words sprinkled throughout the book. I found myself wanting to take out a virtual red pen, which distracted me from the story line.

All-in-all, Wolf’s Rise is a fast-paced story with just the right amount of action, adventure and blood curdling “transformation.” There is NOT too much foul language and the aforementioned rape scene is not as graphic as some PG-13 movies. I gladly allowed my mature 14-year-old to read the story without thinking twice about the “adult” themes.

Review by: cathy j foley: A new ‘man-wolf’ book, released in the midst of the current rage of wolfmen, bloodsuckers, and other human/monsters, is enough to make one skeptical of a new ‘creature’ book on the scene.

That being said, I found the book, a hard to put down read. I felt the people were real, the non-people were real and although the action was violent, every event tied into another event, that would not have had the same outcome, if any of it was candy coated.

As for the ‘swear words’, (I will not call it vulgarity) that too was part of the character of the book. Think about it, if one experienced any of the goings on in this book, i feel an ‘oh, darn’ would hardly have been what was said. I can’t wait for the next chapter to begin. This book can hold its’ own with the best of them.