Zombie Critters - Dead To Us

  As with the immediately proceeding review, we will be brief and kind.  We always debate even penning reviews for the lower lying of the fruit.  But, in the end, we did create this blog to review PB.com material, so all is fair-game.  Zombie Critters (ZC) by Jesse O'Brien is audio, but it is not a book.  We rather envision ZC as the transcript of an event.  Picture, if you will, a dad holding a large glass of over-sweetened ice tea telling a bedtime story to a group of ten year old boy stacked irregularly on the living room floor in sleeping bags for a Saturday night slumber-party.  Though it adds nothing relevant to this review, it is probably mid summer, the dad is in his early forties with a burgeoning paunch, more bald than he'd care to acknowledge, and his wife is upstairs hazed on Xanax staring out the sewing room window into blackness wondering whatever happened to Fred Silverman, the other boy in high school who also asked her to the prom - the one she said, "No, thanks, I already have a date.  He's downstairs at this very moment telling our ten year old's friends a whacky bedtime story.  But, see you in English class Monday, okay?"

  But we digress.  Mr. O'Brien seem perfectly affable and most enthusiastic, but the yarn is not literature.  In the ten minutes we gave ZC, we were pelted with well-intentioned factual and conceptual errors in a story-line which was based on no understanding of reality.  The doctors doing research on revivification pooled their effort.  Not in academics, buddy.  Steal what you can but never cooperate.  Also, they spoke glowingly about their work being worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.  Ah, in medicine, they dream of the Nobel Prize in...  Medicine.  Mother Theresa and the 14th Dalai Lama received the Peace Prize for their effort to promote world... peace.  And the serum the doctor's created was administered to the dead critters by inhalation, as it was easier than delivery by injection.  Ah, how can you administer a nebulized treatment to a dead critter?  They are not...  breathing, right - they're dead.  One could postulate the medication was actually absorded through the skin in this bedtime story, but that wouldn't work either, because dead critters have not circulating blood to transport the vaccine anywhere.

  You, by now, take out point.  ZC might indeed be viewed as an mp3 to play at your son's sleep-over if you are too lazy or inebriated to do so yourself, but Mr. O'Brien warns of graphic content, so, well, that wouldn't fit-the-bill either.  Probably best to just pass on ZC.

The Shadow of Black Wings - A Black Shadow, Indeed

  As you know well, dear reader, we are not here to bash, malign, or otherwise deflower the aspirations of budding-young (or unbudding old) authors.  We were put on this Earth for one purpose and one task alone.  We are here to inform and elucidate!  Hence, we will here be charitable and brief (adjectives somewhat foreign to our nature).  The Shadow of Black Wings (SOBW) is a WSRH for three major reasons.  We should point out that we only made it to midway through the second episode, but, honestly, we could not hang any longer to see if the tale improved.  The three strikes which outed this podcast were rather typical ones.  First and foremost, SOBW promised very much to be another - yawn - coming of age story with teens on dragons.  Replay and of Anne McCaffrey's endless Dragon Rider books - yawn yawn - or DreamWork's How to Train Your Dragon - applause due here - and you have, in watered-down form, SOBW.  Second, the sound quality is marginally acceptable and definitely presents a listening challenge.  Third, the music is ill-fitted to the story.  This pablum tale of teen angst is scored with thunderous and dramatic orchestration.  As we mentioned earlier, we'll be kind, so....  'nuh said.