Alice in Zombieland - Lewis Carroll/Nickolas Cook

Alice in Zombieland by Lewis Carroll

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

AUTHOR: Lewis Carrol/Nickolas Cook
GENRE: Classic/Horror Mash-up
FORM: Book – Advance Review Copy

SYNOPSIS: Alice and her sister go out to the graveyard to do her reading lesson when she gets distracted and sees a black rat checking his watch. Curious, Alice follows the black rat into a hole, and finds herself in a land where the creatures are zombies and ruled by an overbearing Red Queen. Alice finds that she herself is becoming more and more zombie-like and desperately seeks a way to go home.

REVIEW: Assuming you like the classic/horror mash-up books that are pretty popular now, or if you just like a good Zombie book – this book is perfect! You get an almost humorous amount of blood, gore and zombies; and of course the crazy mixed up land of Alice’s Wonderland. It probably has been about two years ago now that I read Alice in Wonderland for the first time, and I what I loved about the book was the double meanings and contradictions, which are of course still present in this version. I’m not typically a lover of horror- like books (and I’m trying to use “horror” lightly, it’s not scary really, but I wouldn’t read it to your grade-schooler!), but when I was approached about reading the book, it just had that fun, trendy appeal to it. And really, what could make the tripped out Alice in Wonderland even better? Zombies, of course! While it was funny envisioning all of the characters in Alice as flesh-eating Zombies, there were still parts where I was frowning and a little bit grossed out.

WHAT I LOVED: I loved how Nickolas Cook took Alice’s sunny colorful world, and changed it completely into a very dark cold one, starting right out with changing the happy tree opening setting to a dark damp graveyard. I wasn’t expecting the transition to start out so quickly. I think I was expecting Alice to be her same sunny self, but sucked into this dark world, which I think would have changed the entire book, because instead of “curious-and-calm Alice,” you would have had “seriously-freaked-out-screaming Alice”. Written this way, the Alice’s are literally like day and night copies of the same book.

NOT SO MUCH: Why is the rabbit a rat now? I don’t know why this bothered me so much, because I can see how a rat fits in the book’s theme, but a black zombie rabbit would have been FLIPPEN FREAKY, don’t you think? Just imagine it with red eyes and sharp teeth….

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