Zombie Day Care by Craig Halloran
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The story starts off a little absurd, Zombies can be subdued my Mountain Dew. It then jumps forward to a time where zombie children are kept in maximum security ‘day care’ centers where a team work to find a cure.
The tale is rather uneven, and jumps around a bit. The character that started it all is simply removed with no further effect on others until the final page, and even then it is nothing more than a side point in an attempt to round things off. Where the main storyline comes from is rather unclear.
The story itself is well written, and moves forward at a good pace. There are several points that are simply introduced with no explanation or background. The issues that are raised are never expanded upon but rather repeated in a different word order. Still, it is easy enough to pick up the general tone and understand who is who.
The biggest flaw were the two pages dedicated to the zombie. Written from a zombies perspective, they were unclear, and never used. Two, page long chapters were written like this, but then stopped. They were never broached again or used to any effect. I understand what the author was trying to do, but ultimately a little more effort would have been appreciated.
There was very little action in the novel, and in theory could quite possibly have been removed altogether. With the merest of modification to a few scenes they were not really important.
The read explains that he understand the concept is odd, and this in someway counteracts the absurdity. It was intentional.
The story was 37,000 and a fun easy read. If you are looking for something a bit different, then this is it. I would certainly be interested in reading other work by the author. With a little bit of polishing, and some refining of story development, the makings are there for something very promising indeed.
I picked this up for free from amazon, and would happily pay to read more work.
Official Site of Alex Laybourne - Author 
Interesting. Just goes to show how important it is to restructure the novel /after/ it’s been written.
Definitely. I mean the Author knew it was a crazy idea, but that was the point. I did like it, but ultimately, the day care was hardly used, it was merely a setting, it played no role. Take away a couple of sentences mentioning toys and you easily have had people trappd in a lab, or a shopping centre, a warehouse… anything.
It was a nice attempty at something different, and I enjoyed reading it, but it needed that extra level of attention to make it special.