A routine zombie apocalypse story, Keith C. Blackmore's Mountain Man can't rise above its clichés to provide a truly exciting read. Its titular character is a hard-drinking, wise-cracking bro, and the novel is filled with run-of-the-mill zombie-killing action, stale banter and tedious bouts of drinking. There's little insight into the character; instead we get scatological humour, and I lost track of how many times Gus, the titular 'mountain man', scratches his balls or downs a bottle of whiskey. A scene where Gus and his companion laugh about one of them shitting their pants, with it "squishin' between my ass cheeks" (pg. 97), suggested to me that, at 33 years old, I might be about two decades removed from the book's target audience.

Mountain Man is written with a reasonable level of skill, given the low bar of the genre, but it stumbles when it tries to break into anything deeper. (Gus' heavy drinking is made light of rather than addressed, with an early reference to not wanting to become like his alcoholic father (pg. 8) being dropped from the rest of the story. Another character's revelation on page 171 that he had to kill his wife and daughter early in the zombie outbreak is artlessly done.) There's a story thread about a serial killer which is created but then left unresolved – no doubt for a sequel novel – and there's no other throughline in the story. The novel's an uninspiring – though agreeable enough – sequence of Gus roaming around an apocalyptic city, killing zombies with a bat or a shotgun, before returning to his ridiculously perfect mountain hideout (which he just happened to stumble upon a few days after the apocalypse) with fortifications, running water, solar panels and even a hard-drive filled with movies. There's a full stock of gas in the garage, a full inventory of medical drugs and supplies and, at one point, our survivor goes out to find a jackpot of weapons and ammunition.

The only thing he lacks, of course, are stakes – some jeopardy or conflict for a reader to invest in. With his mountain-hideout base camp and his fully-stocked armoury and medicine cabinet all in place as we start the story, it's like we're dropping in on somebody playing a video game with all the stats already maxed out. Reading Mountain Man's routine action scenes and safe banter, I felt like I was reading a narrative of a few levels of a video game, a zombie-killing RPG or first-person shooter. I imagine there's an audience for that, but I'll be moving along down the road. ( )

I don't know what it is about people wanting to write stories about the most average, most boring people on the planet doing something super exciting. But it makes for pretty boring stories. Who'd have thought.

RC Bray does an amazing job narrating, as usual, which I think injected some much needed humor into the story. (I've listened to him narrate an Ed Gein documentary and honestly, same vibes.) I got way more into it after an hour when Scotty and Tenner showed up. I was not ready for it! ( )

Loved it!

So what would you do if you came across the perfect hideout for the zombie apocalypse? Solar power and hot water even. Stock it up. Sure. Try to make it more secure. Sure. But who, if anyone, could you trust to bring back to it? Or how long could you live there alone, without going crazy?

And add to that mix a good bit of zombie action, and you have the perfect zombie apocalypse book.

The writing is very good, and the pages practically turned themselves. It's been a while since I breezed through a book as quickly as this one. I didn't want to set it down.

Enjoy!

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A great story about the initial outbreak of the zombie apocalypse. It's really the starting point of the Mountain Man series. ( )

stupendo!! oenso di nn aver mai letto sino ad ora un libro del genere dove ironia insieme ad ansia e terrore si intrecciano creando nel lettore una vera dipendenza..... di libri Horror zombie ne avrò letti a centinaia , questi si posiziona in in cima!!! ( )