Craig W. Chenery

[Disclaimer: I got this book via LibraryThing's Early Reviewer program]
Actually I did not receive the book via the Early Reviewer program (there had been a mismatch); the author was so kind to give me a review copy. The story verges to horror, which is not my cup of tea; luckily it is not heavy horror, so I managed to go through it. I even enjoyed more the second part, the one with the zombie-demons, because it is more fast-paced; I think that the first chapters should have been trimmed, since they are quite slow; it took me a while to read that section. I liked the idea of a bureaucratic afterlife where God (Gary O'Donnell) is a CEO for the Christian part of the Earth and who is not really interested in what happens to His flock, either live or dead; also Death (Steve), who got crossed because he started receiving bugged lists of dying people and decides to see what happens if he skips one, is nice. Probably the Heaven should have been depicted a bit more in detail, instead of writing a lot about Oceanview, AZ, where many characters remain unidimensional. So, don't get scared by the beginning and go through the book!… (altro)

DISCLOSURE: An electronic copy of this book was provided by author Craig W. Chenery, via Library Thing, in exchange for review.

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This very funny and very black fantasy won’t be to everyone’s taste. If your blasphemeter is set on high, you might want to skip it. Chenery’s Supreme Being is a cranky CEO who bullies his underlings, drops F-bombs more liberally than heavenly blessings, and basically just wants everyone to go away and let him hit the front nine before sundown. Likewise, if you’ve been-there done-that with the zombie thing, or if Grade-Z horror flick gorefests aren’t to your liking, you’ll tune out a third of the way through.

One might think, from that, that this reviewer didn’t enjoy the book. One would be wrong. There are absolute laugh-out-loud scenes all the way through, except for that unfortunate middle section, which is largely devoted to cannibalistic zombie-demons. But hey, nobody’s perfect, and Chenery tries valiantly to hold even that section together with black-humor 'Shaun of the Dead' moments that mostly work, thanks to his engagingly quirky characters. It’s an uphill fight to get things back on track, and it’s to Chenery's credit that he does manage to pull it off.

Basically, the plot rests on an initially unknown glitch that has names showing up on Death’s reaping list when they shouldn’t be there at all. It’s messing up the bookkeeping, and Death wants God to fix it, ASAP. The whole thing quickly comes to a head in Oceanview, Arizona, a dyspeptic high-desert version of Lake Wobegon without the Norwegian bachelor farmers -– an isolated (and oceanless) village where the town’s only strip club includes a day care section, and the public library competes with the local beer parlor in providing alcoholic refreshments for its patrons.

Oceanview’s first mistaken-identity victim doesn’t quite die (because technically, it’s not her time yet), but instead goes on a mindless lurching rampage that turns more and more of the townspeople into equally soul-less and hungry zombie demons. A small band of residents, including the town barfly, the chief of police, a pair of arguing brothers and their on-again-off-again girlfriends, and the town shrink are doing their best to stay alive and to figure out what’s going on, while God and Death lock horns over whose problem it is and how it should be solved.

There is a resolution – more or less – but Chenery lists this as Book One of “The Oceanview Trilogy”, so one might suspect that not everything is quite tied up with a nice bow. The next entry, “Satan Just Wanted to Pet Kittens” promises more of the same. Readers with a taste for strange brew will be impatient for that vintage to be uncorked.… (altro)