Release Date: August 30th, 2011
Genre:  Horror, Adventure
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 519
Rating:
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Series: Benny Imura #2 (Review of #1)
Summary (Spoilers, highlight to view):

Six months have passed since the terrifying battle with Charlie Pink-eye and the Motor City Hammer in the zombie-infested mountains of the Rot & Ruin. It’s also six months since Benny Imura and Nix Riley saw something in the air that changed their lives. Now, after months of rigorous training with Benny’s zombie-hunter brother Tom, Benny and Nix are ready to leave their home forever and search for a better future. Lilah the Lost Girl and Benny’s best friend Lou Chong are going with them.


Sounds easy. Sounds wonderful. Except that everything that can go wrong does. Before they can even leave there is a shocking zombie attack in town. But as soon as they step into the Rot & Ruin they are pursued by the living dead, wild animals, insane murderers and the horrors of Gameland –where teenagers are forced to fight for their lives in the zombie pits. Worst of all…could the evil Charlie Pink-eye still be alive?


In the great Rot & Ruin everything wants to kill you. Everything…and not everyone in Benny’s small band of travelers will make it out alive.

Blurb: A mystery that gives you time to think and a story that makes your mind run wild.

Review: I LOVED Rot & Ruin, and as such I knew there was a chance that this book would leave me feeling underwhelmed, and it did.

Rot & Ruin is full of action and emotion and running and jumping and zombies and monsters of the human variety. It's an imaginative smörgåsbord! Dust & Decay, however, is a much slower book. I felt like it took a LONG time for the story to get ANYWHERE.

The beginning of this book is a lot of "talk-talk-talk" and then FINALLY they get moving, but there is SO MUCH going on that the whole book only spans a couple days even though it's 500 pages long. The thing is, that "so much" that's going on isn't very... interesting. Sure there are zombie attacks and crazy-rhino attacks and new mysteries that really make you think, but they didn't go anywhere. Aside from some character growth, I feel like this book didn't progress the story at all. And because it was so slow, I felt like there was a lot more cheesy stuff in it. Lotsa teens acting like doofuses.

HOWEVER, this book is going to be quite a long series (I know there are at least two more books), and if Maberry works well with the other two books then this book could really pay off. I have a feeling that Dust & Decay may be one of those books that you don't really appreciate until you've read the entire series (i.e. Prisoner of Azkaban).

So if you liked Rot & Ruin, PLEASE pick this one up. R&R is WONDERFUL and I can't wait to see where Maberry takes the characters in this series. I just hope the next book takes them somewhere a little quicker.



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