On the surface, Mason James Cole’s Pray to Stay Dead, which comes courtesy of Creeping Hemlock’s Print is Dead imprint, might sound pretty run-of-the-mill, as a variety of characters suddenly find themselves living in a post–zombie-apocalypse world: five friends on a road trip to Lake Tahoe, a feuding older couple running a small store on the road to Tahoe, a war veteran and long-haul trucker seeking to make his way back to his daughter in New Mexico, and a backwoods clan/cult led by a patriarch whose religious fervor is outweighed only by his hypocrisy.
Three things, however, make Pray To Stay Dead stand out:
- The 1974 setting, which adds interest, especially the references to the Cold War, Watergate, President NIxon and other touchstones that serve to capture the zeitgeist of that era.
- The inhumanity displayed by several characters to their fellow man, which at times makes the zombies’ empty-headed hunger seem tame by comparison.
- The characters, who are sufficiently well-drawn to generate reader empathy.
Among those characters, the characters seeking survive the zombie siege in the small store are particularly interesting, as wife Misty, her estranged husband Crate (who’s been living as an exile in a shack behind the store), and her adopted lover Charles form three points of an odd triangle, with emotions and positions shifting significantly during the course of the story, as the stress of the situation naturally brings out the worst in some.
Along the way, Cole makes some interesting observations, such as comparing the naked, morbid curiosity of many onlookers during the Vietnam era with the hunger of the living dead:
“…it was pretty damned obvious: she wanted to know if he’d killed anyone, and if, how many; and what did it look like, feel like, smell like? He saw here eyes crawl over his body, scavenging for overlooked scars. Everyone was a ghoul, eager to rip the bones from the dirt and see if there was anything wet left to suck out. Everyone wanted to hear about the bad stuff, about the brains popping and the blood flying. This had once surprised and disappointed him.”
The above passage may be the first time in P2SD that Cole contrasts the living with the dead, but it’s far from the last. Combine such trenchant observations with engaging characters and an offbeat setting, and you’ve got a recipe for a zombie revival. Cole is apparently the pseudonym of a conservative Utah resident who’d like to keep his authoring alter ego under wraps. Here’s hoping he allows his dark writer side to emerge again soon.
- CROGIAN - August 17, 2013
- Dark Dreams, Pale Horses - November 25, 2012
- Black Horse and Other Strange Stories - August 13, 2012
- Sudden Death Overtime - August 13, 2012
- Pray to Stay Dead - August 13, 2012
- Acheron - August 13, 2012
- The Female of the Species - August 13, 2012
- Deadfall Hotel - April 17, 2012
- Terra Damnata - April 17, 2012
- Lest You Should Suffer Nightmares: A Biography of Herbert van Thal - November 9, 2011
