Pretty dire I'm afraid.

What would have made What Zombies Fear 1: A Father's Quest better?

Far to many issues to pick something that would have made it better to be frank.

Has What Zombies Fear 1: A Father's Quest put you off other books in this genre?

No, not at all. There are some good authors in this genre, though sadly not as many as I would like.

Who might you have cast as narrator instead of Victor Bevine?

Anyone that can do accents. This guy was horrific, and I have no idea why he was picked to narrate it. It's like he listened to an Australian accent and then tried to butcher it as much as humanly possible.

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from What Zombies Fear 1: A Father's Quest?

Too many sadly, and too few that were good.

Any additional comments?

I don't like to slam authors first books, but this one really doesn't work. If it had been well-written that would have helped, but it wasn't. The dialogue is painfully unnatural, character actions and reactions are just fantasy and that is just the beginning of the issues.

You have occasions where the MC saves three hundred peoples lives and suddenly they will all give their lives for him. Sorry, that just isn't human nature. Sure, some may, but others will cause you grief, or want to leave and so on.

The MC is supposed to be some office pencil pusher but then is coming over like he has military training. Crack shot, builds thermite grenades and pushes battlefield tactics. Some of which is stupid, but I suspect that is unintentional rather than the author wanting the MC to be making poor choices.

The biggest issue though, over all of the other stuff, is the superpowers angle. I'm all for trying new things with fiction, or we would just be reading one book over and over, but this is way too far. I'm not a huge fan of zombie books where the zombies somehow get super hearing or sight, as lets face it they are rotting corpses, but I'll let that go by.

The problem is that in this book their are normal zombies, which are the type you'd normal read about, or see on TV etc. Then there are the smart ones, which walk normally, look human, talk, use weapons and lastly but not least, have super powers. They fly, teleport, move ultrafast and are strong.

When you add in that the main character his direct family and two others are "immune", but get super powers themselves you really end up with zombies being rather irrelevant. Honestly I don't see these two genres working well, or at least not for me. It just seemed like a hot mess in general.

The characters never question it either. There is just no reflection over getting these powers, no worry as to what it might mean to them. Will they become one of the smart zombies in time? They just all act like they were born that way, and it is not realistic. And the super powers they have you can tell which superheroes he used as his templates, which is really dull and unimaginative.

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