Week 4: New Weird

The week for the New Weird reading I chose Monster Island for my reading. Now off the bat I can personally say that I really like the blog format in which this piece is written, similar to how some books are written as journal entries. The writing itself is also neat in the way that it feels like actual spoken words or lines of coherent thoughts written out. What the character is thinking is written out in the way the brain quickly processes thoughts and lays out information.The story itself seems a little cliche in my opinion by current standards seeing as how the zombie genre has recently been beaten to death (pun intended) but for the time it was posted, 2004, I think it would've been a more interesting take on the theme. The main protagonist Gary is someone who I relate closely with the characters Rick and Lee from the walking dead series. All of which are father figures doing whatever it takes to keep a child safe in a zombie apocalypse. Unlike them however I value the fact the author chose to broaden their horizons in terms of setting for this novel. The majority of zombie shows of today don't show much extreme movement or relocation of characters, most simply move throughout the nation. Along with this they almost always take place within the US, never acknowledging the pandemic to a global scale. Monster Island chooses to go the distance and actually tells us how the protagonist has traveled from one country to the next showing the reader just how far gone the human race is.