Monday With Kaye: "Allison Hewitt is Trapped” by Madeleine Roux (Reviewed by Kaye George)

I am beginning to think Kaye George has a secret zombie addiction that she does not talk about. Her column this week is on another book that has zombies in it. Today she reviews Allison Hewitt is Trapped by Madeleine Roux. If you are like me and not in to zombies, or even if you are, scroll back in time on the blog and check out the numerous other posts making up the “Monday With Kaye” segments. Between her posts and FFB each week one could come up with quite the reading list.

 

“Allison Hewitt is Trapped” by Madeleine Roux

In this novel, written as a blog complete with comments, we join a huddled mass, mid- zombie-apocalypse, hiding out in the employee break room of a book store. We never find out where the book store is located, but this reader's best guess would be Wisconsin or Minnesota, perhaps Illinois or Indiana. This reluctance to locate the first part of the story is puzzling, since the other bloggers give their locations and the last part of the book takes place in very specific places.

That was about the only problem I had with the novel, though. The blog device is well used and the book is liberally sprinkled with humor. A military wifi called sNet has survived The Outbreak, even though military personnel seem not to have, and, across the globe, whenever laptop owners can get recharged, they hang onto this tenuous thread to keep up each others' spirits.

Allison Hewitt, book lover and employee of Brooks & Peabody book store, is the blogger who keeps them all together. She also assumes leadership of the other employees when the manager holes up in his adjacent office. The others, at the start, are two assistant managers, Janette and Matt, and two customers, Holly and Ted, who have a relationship that earns them the nickname Hollianted. The closed circuit cameras, that keep running on emergency power unlike the heat (it's late September and getting cold out), enable the band to keep track of where the zombies are and to make forays for vending machine junk food and diet sodas. Allison, back at the first invasion, remembered  the ax from the glass fire alarm case and this weapon serves her well as she battles the two types of zombies, Floaters and Groaners.

The group eventually has to leave the bookstore and make their way cross-country on a quest for a place they can settle in relative safety. Some of the original band don't survive, but they pick up others, becoming a fluid group hacking their way through zombies, splattered with zombie juice, and ever in danger of infection.

This manuscript, consisting of the blog entries, is submitted in 2018, one hundred years later, for inclusion in a volume commemorating the event. The book begins with the query letter, followed by the blogs. The ending is excellent!

Reviewed by Kaye George, Author of A Patchwork of Stories for Suspense Magazine