The Dead Shall Inherit The Earth Book

I bought this book with a bit of anticipation. Sci-Fi horror? Cool! Zombies? Cool! So Sci-Fi horror + Zombies? AWESOME!!!
I knew going into this that it was the first work of Vince Churchill plus it was self published (not 100% sure, but pretty positive on both counts). So I was going to forgive him some gramatical grenades as long as there were plenty of grenades being lofted at the undead. At 184 pages I figured our merc heros would be hip deep in undead space zombies no later than 75 pages in. Unfortunately, that was not the case here.

As far as writing mechanics, the one thing that really bugged me was that on several instances the author would put one person's actions in the same paragraph with another speaking. Normally that is ok, as long as there is some clarity as to who is speaking...otherwise I just assume it is the same person who is doing something. Not the case here. Usually it is the person from the previous paragraph speaking and the actions are from another character. I spent more time than I cared to re-reading a few paragraphs here and there to make sure I had it straight who was saying what. Other than that, I felt it was fairly easy to read. Not great, but not painful either.

I have always loved the idea of terror in space; a distant planet or a starship. Either way you are far removed from the rest of humanity usually and the evil that stalks you is generally unavoidable. You can't run, you can't hide. I was hoping that this feeling of claustrophobia would be rampant in this book. Give it the flavor of Aliens along with a bit of Event Horizon with a creepy evil ghost ship as the setting and you get some real chills and thrills.

Instead, the majority of this book is spent in character development. We get an indepth analysis of Jefferson Gale, the leader of the Mercs. Through pre-mission experiences and flashbacks, we learn more and more about him. Honestly, quite a bit more than was necessary for what amounts to a action adventure tale. Certainly, if this was the first book in a series on the exploits of the professional soldiers of Omni Corporation, the volume of detail spent on getting to know the characters might be acceptable. But this is a stand alone story and I generally tend to like to spend more than about 30% of a horror/action adventure getting scared or getting a rush.

Vince did a good job describing the zombies and the 50 pages or so of action at the end of the book was pretty scary and I enjoyed that, but it just was not enough. In addition, the back cover of this book gave the impression that if this crew did not stop the zombie menace, all of humanity might be in jeopardy. Not at one point in the entire book did I ever feel that humanity was truly at risk. Instead, there is some political deception and revenge motives uncovered. How that is dealt with is decidedly unsatisfactory to me-after all these guys are mercs, not politicians themselves. The end result of that just left me disapointed.

I still give this book 3 stars because even though the zombie action was brief, it was pretty entertaining. I could see this author getting stronger and improving his skills and coming back with another book that gets to the point a lot faster and keeps me glued to the page. I think he could have cut out a lot of the character development and flashbacks and made a 100 page book that would have been a real hoot here. So I liked certain parts enough that I wish there just had been more of that instead of feeling it was a blown effort.