NerderyBlog[dot]Com Video Reviews 15 [Rainbows and Unicorn Edition] from Greg Hyatt on Vimeo.

(The new RetroFix feature is REALLY good.)

Click to embiggen.

Or this:

Click. Embiggen.

Oh, wait. That’s MightyGodKing’s I Don’t Need Your Civil War.

The canon Civil War is one riddled with plot holes, logic flaws and terrible dialogue.

Come on.

Why on Earth would you try to place Captain America on the “wrong side” of a fight like this? The guy has punched Nazis in the face for seventy years. It’s like trying to convince us Superman is wrong.

Right.

NerderyBlog[dot]Com Video Reviews 14 from Greg Hyatt on Vimeo.

The Pride and Prejudice and Zombies prequel, Dawn of the Dreadfuls, starts off great. Designed to explain how the Bennet family became such able zombie fighters, the novel never lives up to the opening line’s potential.

Walking out in the middle of a funeral would be, of course, bad form. So attempting to walk out on one’s own was beyond the pale.

Dawn of the Dreadfuls opens with a single zombie rising at a funeral, twenty or so years after a massive outbreak referred to as the Troubles. Mr. Bennet takes this as a sign of another outbreak and converts his wife’s greenhouse back to his dojo.

That’s right, Mr. Bennet is some sort of martial arts master.

Having been trained in Asia for the Troubles, he passes his knowledge along to his daughters, much to the dismay of his shrill and obnoxious wife. Except he’s not doing a good enough job and someone sends them a new master.

Written in what I presume is a style similar to Jane Austen’s didn’t help my enjoyment, either. (Despite the period-appropriate style, the author, Steve Hockensmith, manages to slip in at least one reference to Shaun of the Dead.) The dialogue in this novel is so overdramatic, it was impossible for me to take any of it seriously. I realize the entire premise is tongue-in-cheek, but, damn it, I’d like to try to like the story.

I couldn’t. I couldn’t even force myself to finish the book.

It’s too slow, building up to boring, suspense-free action scenes. That’s a problem. I made it two hundred pages into this book and there were barely any zombies.

In a book about zombies.

There wasn’t even the threat of zombies. Some characters believe there’s a new outbreak on the horizon; other think the few, solitary zombie sightings are an isolated incidents. And you know what? Despite the fact that we know those people are wrong, that there will be a big zombie fight, it’s not even hinted at that it’s possible they’re wrong.

The problem with prequels is we know that certain characters are going to survive. There’s no danger to the Bennet family because they all appear in the “original” work. That leaves new characters created for the book. And I can’t take an obese nineteenth century frat boy or a torso in a wheelbarrow seriously.

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The publisher, Quirk Classics, is running a contest. If you’d like, you can register to win a prize pack that includes a journal, postcards and several other things.