Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #46845 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In Wellington's energetic horror debut, the first of a promised trilogy, Manhattan has become Monster Island after a plague has turned all its denizens into shambling, rotting animated corpses, except for a couple who have kept their intelligence and also acquired psychic powers. When an expedition from Africa arrives, composed of teenage girl-soldiers and a former U.N. weapons inspector, the zombie masters mobilize their forces to kill or eat the living humans. Page by page, the story is inventive and exciting as Wellington exploits his familiarity with New York's nooks and crannies as settings for flesh-chomping battles and narrow escapes. As a whole, though, the book satisfies less since the author selectively forgets anything about the situation or the characters that would inhibit further gross-out episodes. Still, the novel offers some provocative thoughts about the purpose of life and death underlaid with some ultra-dark humor. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
This is a zombie novel--a fantastic zombie novel. Most of the world has fallen to the undead, with pockets of survivors clinging to a precarious existence. At the behest of the leader of the Free Women's Republic of Somaliland, a shipload of those makes the ludicrous trip from Africa to New York in a desperate quest for medicine. New York is a wasteland, and everything depends on a small, incredibly dedicated band of teenage girls, armed to the teeth, and native guide Dekalb, formerly a UN arms inspector. Also, in NYC there is Gary, a zombie who, completely unexpectedly, retains live human mental faculties. The questers get ringside seats for some of the apocalypse's finest moments, and no matter how prepared they thought they were, something worse awaits in the depths of New York. When zombies have already overrun everything, that's saying something. There are many layers to this zombie apocalypse, and this book just gets things rolling. Stay tuned. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
David Wellington was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1971. He attended Penn State and received there an MFA in creative writing. He works as an archivist for the United Nations in New York City.

In 2003 he began work on the website “www.monsternovel.com”, where his novel Monster Island was serialized on-line over the course of five months and quickly became an internet cult phenomenon. Two sequels to Monster Island have since also been serialized in the same fashion.

Customer Reviews

Great concept, crumbles a little towards the end.
An entertaining take on zombie tales. Where he went with the story made it less of a horror book and more of an "us vs. them" or good guys vs. bad guys story, but the characters were kind of interesting and it kept the plot moving along. Worth the read. Also, google the books and you can find them for free online.

A solid and inventive zombie movie... er, book.
Anyone who's a fan of George Romero's work will love MONSTER ISLAND. This book reads like one of the classic DEAD movies, full of action and fairly interesting characters caught in bad situations. In fact, a few of MONSTER ISLAND's characters are fairly well, uh, fleshed out? Ha ha. Even better, Wellington throws in some fresh, surprising plot twists along with the usual paint-by-the-numbers zombie fare. Some of the reversals I never saw coming. This is not profound literature by any means, but it is very, very entertaining!

Decent Start
This was a pretty good first horror novel. The writing was pretty crisp and the action flowed along well. There were some plotting problems that seemed to hurt the story a little. The story itself is basically split between a former UN peacekeeper who travels to Manhattan with a group of Somalian women fighters to find aids fighting drugs for their leader, and Gary an intelligent zombie. I though the Gary character was very original, and I liked the slow moving Romero type zombies. I thought the author missed a few good gross out kill moments he could have jumped on. I also didn't like the supernatural element that was added to the story near the end. Mummies, magic and wizards really took me out of the story. I have been reading some bad reviews on the next two books in the series, so I am a little hesitant to continue on with story. Maybe if my reading pile goes down a bit I may give the others a chance.