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Zombie Bible: Death Has Come Up Into Our Windows (2011)

by Stant Litore(Favorite Author)

3.44 of 5 Votes: 2

languge

English

genre

Horror

publisher

Dante's Heart

series

The Zombie Bible

review 1: Stant Litore's Zombie Bible series is a unique take on the saturated genre of zombie fiction - and it's surprisingly effective! He has taken select Bible stories & reworked them with added zombies. But forget Pride and Prejudice and Zombies with its forced humour, this is a much more mature & affecting book.This is the first in the series but each book is a separate Bible-inspired story, which is why it says on the authors' website that they can be read in any order. It's the story of Old Testament Prophet Jeremiah (referred to by his non-anglicized name Yirmiyahu), who has been thrown down a dry well in Yerusalem. This is because his rage & frustration at the social injustice in his city earned the wrath of his king, who has come to "love wealth instead of improving the h... moreealth of his people". And while poverty & zombies consume Yerusalem from within, the hordes of neighbouring Babylon lay siege to it from without. We learn through flashbacks that Yirmiyahu preached that the city gates should be opened to let the Babylonians cleanse the zombies & feed the poor, which naturally did not go down well with the ruling class whose wealth would be plundered.As a non-Christian, I initially had mixed feelings about the biblical element but while it's a significant part of the background & Yirmiyahu's psyche, there's no overt preaching to the reader. Instead Yirmiyahu's burning rage at social injustice ties in rather well with the themes of modern zombie novels. Instead of corporate irresponsibility & governments dispassionately making no attempt to save those caught up in infected areas, we have affluent rulers who have neglected their people, priests who sacrifice food to "gods who promise the most rewards for the least effort" while their own people are starving. Either way, Litore informs us that whether it's "our tendency to let problems fester untended until they become crises [or] our frequent inability to work together for a common good," in his alternative history, "the rapid rise of an outbreak is nearly always a consequence of our own failings." And the spiritual failings of a society lead to its physical demise.This is an incredibly short introduction to the series (the Kindle edition is 89 pages). The claustrophobic setting of the well weaves a genuinely creepy atmosphere, making this a mostly psychological horror & more than that, an introspective on how morality should (yet all too often doesn't) shape social action. Indeed the zombies are mostly incidental. If you want more zombie-slaying action, apparently Strangers in the Land - the third book in this series - has it in spades, although I haven't read it yet. But given how Litore's haunting debut has stuck in my mind, I'll be reading them all very soon!
review 2: So the Babylonians are coming and Jeremiah is calling the nation of Israel to repentance for her idolatry and the breaking of covenant with her God. This is the history. Into this, Stant Litore throws zombies to make a dire situation even more dire and add a new difficulty for our intrepid prophet and the covenant people of God.I wanted to like this one. Like, really. It's a really interesting concept (if not necessarily entirely original) and I like the allegorical possibilities that present themselves when the living dead are present among the spiritually dead. From very early on, though, I found myself disappointed. Some things you should know about this book:1.) It's quite short. I'm not sure how many pages it would be in print as I read it on the Kindle, but I imagine it was somewhere on the order of 100 pages. This isn't necessarily bad. Just something you'll notice pretty quick.2.) From the outset, the author refers to God in the feminine. I have to be honest, this really gets on my nerves. I have nothing against femininity and God doesn't either (despite the claims of His critics), but the God of the Bible; the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and, yes, Jeremiah, is referred to in the masculine. He is God, the FATHER. This isn't novel and it isn't intellectual, it strikes me as cheesy and gratuitous. It's one of those things that is so annoying to me that it made it hard to consider this book a real winner after the first appearance of the word, "she." The idea of a female god is intriguing and Litore played it well, don't get me wrong...but as I've mentioned, the God of the Bible is simply no referred to in the feminine. To make an adequate comparison, it would be like writing a historical fiction novel in which Abraham Lincoln was portrayed as a lady. ...only, now that I write that...it sounds kinda interesting. Take it for what you will.3.) Not a ton of zombie action here. In fact, not a ton of action at all. The entirety of the plot in the book occurs in something a little like hybrid flashbacks and first person remembrances. Jeremiah, in actuality, spends the entirety of the book at the bottom of a well. Accordingly, there is very little by way of resolution. He starts in a well, he ends in a well...you are told of his prophesying to King Zedekiah, you are told of the Babylonian siege...but you aren't really told where it all ends up. Guess you'll have to read the Bible to get resolution...again, maybe not a bad thing.4.) The one very strong point in this book, in my opinion, and the most fully-developed plot line, is the relationship between Jeremiah, and Miriam, his wife. Their love is beautifully portrayed and paralleled with the covenant of God with her (His) people, and it was this love, and Jeremiah's commitment to his wife, that made me care of about him (and therefore this book) at all.All in all, it was an interesting read that, in my opinion, fell well short of its potential and ventured too far into cliche and trend. This could have been done so well. And, while I'm unimpressed with the direction this book took, I have every confidence that Stant Litore even has the style and skill to pull it off fantastically - there's no question the man can write. That said, it needed to be longer, more developed, more conflicted, and less cliched. Prose simply won't carry the whole shebang the whole way. less

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