Book Review: Dead Station by Shamon Harper

Newsflash: That Facebook algorithm is smart. A few months back, it figured out that this guy over here with the book review blog may actually enjoy reading. Mix in my engagement with Star Wars, Marvel, and other geeky stuff, and it finally got the bright idea to serve me up ads for sci-fi books.

And a bought them. A whole mess of them.

Yes, the guy who works in advertising fell victim to ads. These books all sounded right up my alley, and before I knew it I was searching Barnes & Noble for them.

I've since put more book purchases on hiatus...mostly (I still might get the one set in the 50s that involved flying saucers - that looked neat). A large part of it is remembering that most books worth reading aren't doing Facebook ads; conversely, the only other time I read a book due to a Facebook ad it was terrible (although its review was the only one to garner over 100 views - crazy since it was only one sentence).

So here's the first of my Facebook purchases - Shamon Harper's Dead Station. And, in print that was too tiny for me to see on the thumbnail, and that will be VERY important later, I should mention that this is "Humanity Shattered Book 1".

Dead Station involves a group of space marines (or some type of army folks) sent to investigate a space station that stopped communicating. When they get there, they discover that almost everyone on board has been turned into zombies (and yes, this is my first Halloween read of the season for that reason!).

Now, if you take another look at the cover, I want to point out one more piece of writing. Right in the middle of the cover it says "A Military Zombie Space Opera". Now, the words "space opera" don't have an official definition, but we know it's more "Star Wars" than "Star Trek". We know not to worry about how they eat and breathe and other science facts. And we know it means fun.

This book is not fun. The set-up is as you'd expect: meet the team, they get a call to investigate, they enter and don't see anybody, finally they find some zombies, and the fighting starts.

That fighting starts pretty quickly and lasts...all the way through the end of the book. Which, as you can imagine, gets very repetitive and hard to keep track of what they are trying to accomplish (made even harder by there being tons of characters who are very hard to keep straight). And there's no way to put it lightly - the fighting is a SLOG, with the same action happening again and again (also, I hope the author can find another way to describe a zombie attack than "something slammed into him/her").

Also, concentrating on the fighting puts guardrails on the story. Want to find out what caused the zombie plague? Want to find out how it has spread to different planets/stations? Want to find out the civilian response to this apocalypse? Then...guess we'll have to order Book 2!

I don't want it to seem like I'm dragging the author - from what I read, he's not a professional author, but instead a former soldier who loves sci-fi and horror. So I wrote what he knows, put it in a setting he loves, and got it published. That's remarkable! Just want to make it clear that while I didn't enjoy this book, I still have mad respect for the people who write them.

Anyway, I would skip this one - four out of ten hot dogs.