by James Cook & Joshua Guess
Synopsis
Publication Date: August 5, 2013
During the Outbreak, like billions of others, a man finds himself infected with the Phage. Desperate to spare his family from watching him become a walking nightmare, he flees. Soon after, he is dead.
Two years later, he wakes up.
Not in the afterlife, but in his own body. Trapped, unable to control the monster that carries him, and forced to witness the horror of its existence.
A hundred miles away, Sergeant Ethan Thompson thinks he has seen the worst the apocalypse has to offer.
He is wrong.
Following the trail of a dying madman, he will embark on a journey of vengeance that will test the limits of his sanity. Along the way, he will learn that there is no justice at the end of the world. There is only the living and the dead, and in between, there is The Passenger.
Review
Note: I purchased this book on Amazon for my Kindle.
I was pleasantly surprised by The Passenger. I've been a fan of James Cook for a while, but I hesitated reading this. I'm not even sure why... I think maybe because I didn't think I'd be into the first-person perspective of a zombie.
No offense to zombies, but I assumed a first-person account of a zombie would be all about ripping people apart and the eating of flesh. There was plenty of that, but there was so much more to the zombie character than just that! I never knew a zombie could become a likable character in any book, but I found myself cheering this one on.
The Passenger isn't written just from the perspective of one of the undead, however. The reader also gets a view of the world through the third-person account of Sgt. Ethan Thompson. Ethan is a character introduced in one of James Cook's earlier novels in his Surviving the Dead series.
The Passenger is sort of a companion book to the Surviving the Dead series. It is also a stand-alone story and it is absolutely possible to read this book without having read any of the other Surviving the Dead books.
I gave The Passenger 5 out of 5 stars on Amazon. If this is your genre and you haven't read it yet, do yourself a favor and get it!
Get The Passenger on Amazon
About the Authors
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| James Cook |
James N. Cook (who prefers to be called Jim, even though his wife insists on calling him James) is a martial arts enthusiast, a veteran of the U.S. Navy, a former cubicle dweller, and the author of the Surviving the Dead series. He hikes, he goes camping, he travels a lot, and he has trouble staying in one place for very long. He lives in North Carolina (for now) with his wife, son, two vicious attack dogs, and a cat that is scarcely aware of his existence.
Where to find James Cook:
Amazon
Goodreads
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| Joshua Guess |
Where to find Joshua Guess:
Amazon
Facebook
Goodreads
Joshua Guess' Blog
Living with the Dead
Twitter
Amazon
Goodreads
Joshua Guess' Blog
Living with the Dead
My name is Joshua Guess. I used to have one of those impersonal third-person biographies here. I thought it would be a nice change of pace to just say hello and tell you a bit about myself.
Let's see...I wrote Living With the Dead, which is probably how you found my author page. LWtD was a serialized tale set in the zombie apocalypse. It's a little different from most zombie fiction in that it's told in real time and in blog format. Which means that you got a literal day-by-day look into the lives of people working to survive and rebuild in a world destroyed by the dead.
In March of 2013 I went full-time as a novelist. Since then I have published three novels--Victim Zero, Dead Will Rise, and Next--and have many more planned for the near future. For more, check out my author website (which is a blog) at JoshuaGuess.com
That's my work, though. I want to share a little about me as well.
I'm an avid and voracious reader. I have been since I was a kid. One of the things that pushed me to write in the first place was a deep love of the art form. In LWtD and "Beautiful", you'll see a lot of my personality and interests coming through. I've had a lot of hobbies and I'm almost pathologically curious, which shows in my writing.
For example my character in LWtD, who is simply a fictional version of me, has skills that include: Martial arts (Aikido, Judo, and some sword training), training as an EMT, a nurse's aide, Fire/Rescue, Carpentry, and many others. His scope of knowledge is wide and random, from physics to history, horticulture to biology. All of that stuff is from real life. I'm a huge nerd, and I love to learn.
I'm a big fan of animals. My wife and I have three cats, two dogs, and a pair of ferrets. We're right across the road from a nature preserve, so we get all manner of winged fowl in our neighborhood, as well as deer wandering our streets. It's pretty neat to have nature walk so casually across our paths.
Pretty random, I know.
One thing that draws me to authors is reading or hearing them talk about the craft of writing. Too often, it seems, writers forget that in fiction the idea is to entertain. At least, that's what I hope to achieve. It isn't my intent to beat anyone over the head with my beliefs, but instead to provide a good reading experience and hopefully make people sit back and think while they enjoy.
It is also my goal to be as interactive and responsive as possible. Part of the reason I set up my author website as a blog (other than my lack of ability as a webmaster and unwillingness to overpay someone to build me a website at the moment) is because I love talking with readers. I'm thrilled to get emails from people that have checked out my work. I love reading reviews and responding to them, good or bad.
That's me in a few hundred words.
Let's see...I wrote Living With the Dead, which is probably how you found my author page. LWtD was a serialized tale set in the zombie apocalypse. It's a little different from most zombie fiction in that it's told in real time and in blog format. Which means that you got a literal day-by-day look into the lives of people working to survive and rebuild in a world destroyed by the dead.
In March of 2013 I went full-time as a novelist. Since then I have published three novels--Victim Zero, Dead Will Rise, and Next--and have many more planned for the near future. For more, check out my author website (which is a blog) at JoshuaGuess.com
That's my work, though. I want to share a little about me as well.
I'm an avid and voracious reader. I have been since I was a kid. One of the things that pushed me to write in the first place was a deep love of the art form. In LWtD and "Beautiful", you'll see a lot of my personality and interests coming through. I've had a lot of hobbies and I'm almost pathologically curious, which shows in my writing.
For example my character in LWtD, who is simply a fictional version of me, has skills that include: Martial arts (Aikido, Judo, and some sword training), training as an EMT, a nurse's aide, Fire/Rescue, Carpentry, and many others. His scope of knowledge is wide and random, from physics to history, horticulture to biology. All of that stuff is from real life. I'm a huge nerd, and I love to learn.
I'm a big fan of animals. My wife and I have three cats, two dogs, and a pair of ferrets. We're right across the road from a nature preserve, so we get all manner of winged fowl in our neighborhood, as well as deer wandering our streets. It's pretty neat to have nature walk so casually across our paths.
Pretty random, I know.
One thing that draws me to authors is reading or hearing them talk about the craft of writing. Too often, it seems, writers forget that in fiction the idea is to entertain. At least, that's what I hope to achieve. It isn't my intent to beat anyone over the head with my beliefs, but instead to provide a good reading experience and hopefully make people sit back and think while they enjoy.
It is also my goal to be as interactive and responsive as possible. Part of the reason I set up my author website as a blog (other than my lack of ability as a webmaster and unwillingness to overpay someone to build me a website at the moment) is because I love talking with readers. I'm thrilled to get emails from people that have checked out my work. I love reading reviews and responding to them, good or bad.
That's me in a few hundred words.
