Oops! Tales of the Zombie Turkey Apocalypse by Andy Zach is
a collection of short stories and as the clue is in the title, the theme is
zombies. And boy do they come in a variety of different shapes and sizes.
The book starts with three stories that are a starter and
not in the zombie genre. Firstly, you are introduced to a world where nothing
is heard. Then we move on to finding an elusive phoenix and trying to use its
DNA for breeding. Lastly, we have a story about a time-travelling wheelchair.
Then we jump straight into zombies. From zombie pickles, to
zombie service dog corgis, to zombie models and even zombies in a nursing home.
There is a timeline thread running through the stories where characters that
create something or meet someone bring them into a later story. And all of this
in a world where becoming a zombie is as easy as ordering blood online! After
each story, the author explains where he got his ideas from, and since in his
bio he claims both his parents were zombies, he must be an expert on all things
undead. The author has a very quick mind and some of the quips and plays on
words were very clever. In some of the stories, however, I would have preferred
a definite ending—one where the story doesn’t just finish and you think there
is more coming. It was almost as though they were ideas taken from diary
extracts with sporadic glimpses into a world of zombies.
After the zombie stories came tales from some of his other
books about teenage superheroes. I think the one I enjoyed the most was of the
hamster that one of the kids had experimented on and had developed some superpowers.
He taught himself to read and was eventually able to communicate with others by
typing on a computer. The author very cleverly integrated himself into that
story by being the author in the story and the one that the hamster contacted.
And of course, we had to have a story about aliens to end it off.
The editing of the book was very good, and I only caught a
couple of minor errors. I enjoyed the writing style of the main author and very
often you had to reread something because the clever nuances were so subtle you
only got them a few lines later. The different styles of writing by the
different authors was a bit offputting as you get into a tempo with one and
then get thrown off your rhythm by another.
While I enjoyed the book overall, I would still put it in my
average category as I wouldn’t go back and reread it. I would, however,
recommend it to anyone looking for a quick read where you can turn your brain
off from reality and just jump into a world of crazy.
Thank you to Reedsy Discovery and the author for an ARC:
