LAURENCE FEGAN

I am not entirely sure what is with this particular novelette. It seems more like an imaginary "What If" tale where a girl named Samantha of an unspecified age has noticed a lot of people from her community staying home sick for no apparent reason, and while walking her dog, she witnesses a helicopter crashing in front of her.

Quite frankly, from the way Sam spoke like a tavern crawler regular, I assumed the protagonist was a middle aged man with a blue collar background. Believe me; I would have had a hell of a hard time pulling a full grown man from a burning helicopter.

Alas, Sam rescued an important scientist everyone calls Professor who is apparently tasked to live perfectly isolated in a military bunker without any assistants in order to find a cure for the mysterious Stinkies ailment. He feels sorry for Samantha, casually offers her a syringe with a sedative (because what kind of young woman doesn't find the lure of free drugs offered by a complete stranger to be a great way to break the ice?), and she eagerly gets high and passes out.

Sam wakes up in the bunker, perpetually locked up in her room with a bunch of Blu-ray discs and microwave instant dinners while being unable to touch the Professor, allegedly in order to keep her from getting infected with whatever he is working on.

When he is busy in his lab meddling with corpses, he doesn't wear a hazmat suit and despite being elderly, he is physically strong enough to carry bodies around without any issue.

Sam is getting cabin fever and asks the Professor for permission to stand outside for a while in the sun. He agrees out of a sense of guilt for imprisoning her without telling her the whole story about the Stinkies eating everyone's brains or something. And then... she hears a voice that starts asking her weird questions...

This story seems to serve more as a sort of experimental writing workshop instead of a real book. I can forgive... some plot holes, but when you mix a weird story with an even weirder ending that doesn't exactly solve anything with overuse of exclamation marks, you know you are in trouble. It was quite jarring to read, and I felt glad the story ending (such as it did) so quickly.

Maybe if you are truly into zombie stories where a mad scientist wants to form some sort of Lolita/Stockholm Syndrome love story with a person 3 times his junior, then go ahead! I think most readers will agree that either have plot holes or no exclamation marks, but don't dump both unwanted options together.… (mais)