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Pages: 70
Goes Well With: Umm…well…you might not want to eat while reading this one, folks.
Along a less-traveled suburban road in Medford, Pennsylvania, a cemetery stands dark and foreboding. For over a hundred years, people who find themselves stranded near this graveyard late at night disappear. The disappearances have become so bad that people are no longer buried in the cemetery, and tourists are cautioned to stay away. What is happening to these people? Well, if they ignore good advice from the locals, they end up getting eaten by zombies that crawl out of the graves during an electrical storm.
After a gang of robbers shoot and wound his girlfriend at Damon’s Bar and Grill, Damon Chandler takes the law into his own hands and goes after them. A month later, his search takes him down Decatur Road, where he encounters flesh-eating zombies. Barely escaping with his life, he returns to Medford, where he discovers that zombies have begun to overrun the town. Now he’s in a fight for his life and that of his wife.
Dead Crazy is filled with stomach-turning scenes as zombies tear off limbs, pull out intestines, and rip into throats while devouring a person alive. I didn’t feel like eating for hours after reading this one. In fact, the whole purpose of this novel seemed to be to see how sick and twisted the scenes could get, and no real storyline developed before the end.
You don’t really get to know Damon Chandler all that well, so it might leave you not caring whether he survives. Also, in the first part of the book, he has a girlfriend, then, a few chapters later, he’s married to a different woman, which could be plausible in real life, but it left me feeling a bit confused, and it gave me a reason to dislike Damon.
Other problems I had with this story include its passive voice, its overuse of exclamation points, and too much character description. Stephen King once said something like: give just enough description of a person to get a vague sketch of what they look like, then let the reader fill in the rest with their imagination—and I agree. I hate to see a character in my head then have the author ruin it by describing someone who looks totally different from what I imagined. This happened too many times in Dead Crazy.
With a spooky graveyard and a creepy, foggy road where people have disappeared since the 1800s, Dead Crazy had the potential to be a truly well written and terrifying horror novel, but author William Cole failed to develop the characters and the plot enough to make it interesting. Instead, all I got was an unsettled stomach for my trouble. However, if you’re a huge zombie fan and only care about the gross-inducing aspects of a story, Dead Crazy might be perfect for you.
