Can You Survive the Zombie Apocalypse?

Ok, its one of those Chose your Own adveture books and its a great read. I opened it up and starting reading/adventuring and the next thing I knew- 2 hours had gone by without a notice. Good word art.visualization. Its not your G rated, everyone going to make it Disney book. It real life, dilema with some tongue in cheek play. Even some choices if you went weasle route, the Author cold smacks you for being a douche! Great fun! Even when you think you goign to make it, you might not! It has all sorts of things:Bike gangs, art museums, love of your life, striper samurai (yes I said samurai stripper!), school kid dilemas, police swat, military, marine sniper and huge a$$ rifle! Looking forward to reading with the team mates and making it a drinking game. Its that fun! If you like Zombie books or fun this is a book to get! My only 2 regrets are: 1) should had ordered a NEW copy (the used is fine but after reading it and luvin it, going to get another NEW copy for sure) 2) Should have bought this a long time ago, it's that good abook!

I can't remember that last time I came across something that has been as thoroughly entertaining and laugh out loud funny as this book. When I bought it I was expecting over the top action and vulgarity... which it has in spades... but it delivers it in a way that is imaginative, hilarious and undeniably original. The characters and dialogue are of a much higher caliber than you would expect from a "Zom-com" book and author Brallier's fast paced, to the point writing style keeps the energy high and the pages turning throughout. All in all a FANTASTIC read. Whether you're a zombie fan or not you won't be able to help yourself from laughing and consequently loving all the situations that you wind up in. I don't know how $10 could entertain you more!

Zombies are suddenly everywhere, what would you do??? The book puts you in the place of a young man and then you make choices at every turn. It got to be a bit tiresome reading a page or two then making a choice that required you to move on to another part of the book but it was fun choosing options to proceed. Some of the options were odd, others were far-fetched and several times I wished for a third option as neither one presented was something I would likely consider under any circumstance up to and including zombie attack. If you are a fan of zombie books, you will enjoy it but it won't keep you up at night (either from fear or wanting to read a few more pages). I recommend it for zombie fans if you want something a bit more fun than scary for a change. SDMF

Helps to get you back into reading again and it's fun as you can choose your own path. Different endings and consequences for your actions.

I bought this for my 12-year old son, and he loved it. One warning-- there are curse words used throughout, so I wouldn't necessarily recommend this book for other 12 year olds (or younger kids). My son worked his way through most of the scenarios-- the author presents you with a situation and then requires you to pick one of two or three possible actions. Each action refers you to a different page number, sometimes moving forward, sometimes backwards, through the book. You either die or live to decide on another action, depending on your choices. It's a fun read, and my son told me that there are several positive outcomes. I read part of the book, and my 16 year old read it, too. If you like Zombies (for example, if you are a fan of "The Walking Dead" on AMC or of the comic books) then you'll like this book.

I admit I'm not a zombie fan, so this review is coming from that perspective. I read this novel with my son, so I will also provide his thoughts (he loves zombies). Let me briefly capture the nature of the novel, before I review our experience. The novel is many small chapters and the reader is the main character. You read the first chapter and then select a choice at the end of what you would do next and then that takes you to a different chapter. You do the same with that, etc until you die or kill all the zombies (I think--we died so we never got to that alternative). This sounded exciting and like an approach that would appeal to a reluctant reader because they would be more engaged in picking what comes next. First off, it had errors in it--spelling errors or sentences that didn't make sense. Normally, I don't notice this much but even my son was pointing it out. Second, it was difficult to track the different plot lines. I don't know if we just aren't trained to read this type of novel, but when we would chose which option to follow, we would often get to the successive chapter and it would literally not make any sense from the preceding chapter. We would have to go back and re-read and try to get connected to the next chapter. It's not a complicated story line so it's not a big deal that we got lost. The zombies are coming. You don't know if your friends are zombies and you are trying to keep from becoming a zombie yourself. There are lots of swear words, which made this a very difficult book to read aloud. Clearly, it's a book better for someone to read to his/herself. I found the book completely unsatisfying--the story line so simplistic as to be almost non-existent; the chapters so short, I could never get engaged and the characters so simplistic and so often dying that they didn't add anything to the novel. My son seemed to find the book fine. He wasn't particularly interested in creating another reading after he finished his first one. He did struggle trying to decide what to do at the end of each chapter. It almost seemed as if he would have preferred the author make that decision for him. He was definitely confused when we would move to the next chapter, but it didn't seem to bother him. He would just read on. He got the general, simple plot line and liked the swearing and killing. I gave it three stars to capture the fact that it seemed fine to my son and I did not like it at all.

This is a very unexpected surprise! I'm a fiend for post-apocalyptic, survival and basically any kind of lone-man-against-stacked-odds kind of story. There are so many twists and turns, and various endings that it's a joy to read! Couldn't be happier! One constructive criticism however: it's handy to use multiple bookmarks so you can go back to a prior fork-in-the-road-decision, but a good way to make this already awesome book better would be to give the page number of the prior choice presentation. That way it's easier to backtrack, and find out where you journey would take you if you had done things differently.

There are two major problems with this book. The first is the character isn't noble or very interesting. As a self-described ex-drunken college kid who is a slouch at work, he doesn't inspire anything in the reader. I'm not sure who the author is trying to identify him with, but it really can't be the person actually experiencing this story. Is it likely that kind of guy is going to be reading this book? There is really nothing about this character that suggests he'd live for more than a couple minutes in a zombie apocalypse. The other problem is really that the book is very formulaic. The author throws a lot of fairly recent cultural references at the reader to build some sort of common ground, things like Seinfeld or Half Life or whatever, but after a while they just look like filler. The paths through the book appear to be intentionally short, so you won't find the one or two great, long stories like traditional which-way books had. Even when you are doing well, the reward is a short ending. The point appears to be to create 50 different short stories that you can experience, but none of them have the kind of drama that make you want to live longer. The idea of a choose your own adventure book for adults is really quite novel, but this particular incarnation certainly isn't. Hopefully someone else will make a better attempt.

Strongly suggested for the zombies fans, It's nice to read. It won't change your life, however you ll get some nice time!

I have fond memories of reading choose-your-own-adventure books growing up. These are books that put you as the main character, offering you choices that lead to different outcomes. That's the basic format of the book. The premise is equally simple: zombies have broken out in New York. These zombies are like Romero zombies (dumb, man-eating, bite causes zombie-ism, head shot to kill) only they can run quickly. Your job is simple- survive the outbreak. The content of this book is surprisingly well-written for the zombie genre, which is normally pretty boring rehash or simple gore. While there is some gore in here, this book doesn't glorify it. There's also drugs, guns, girls, booze, bikers, and buds. All in all, the content is, in my opinion, more AA-14 than "R"-rated. Nothing too explicit in any context, but enough to make the book interesting, funny, and full of action. If you're a fan of zombie movies, there's a ton of inside references throughout this book, as well as to general pop-culture references from the 90's through to now. My guess as that the author is around 30, and writes for his generation. And as I said, he writes well. Granted, this is nothing close to Shakespear, but it's not meant to be. It's meant to be a bit of fun reading. At close to 400 pages though, there's lots of reading and lots of different choices and paths. I think there's about 9 or so main different plot lines that you can choose, each one full of many ways to die and only one or two ways to live (I survived my first read through the book, future attempts were more mixed). There's lots of variety in the kind of decisions you make, the settings (from suburbia to sewers to skyscrapers), the people you are with (bikers, babes, bozos, and more), the weapons you use (all kinds of regular and improvised weapons), and the choices you have to make (save some kids, let the girl die, sacrifice yourself for a group, etc.). The author has a good sense of humor, and uses it often to emphasize certain choices as being particularly good or particularly bad. My favorite scene had to be the comic book convention, which featured costumed super-heroes fighting real zombies. Classic fun! All in all then, if you're a fan of light pop fiction, choose-your-own-adventures, and/or zombies, then I highly recommend this book. The writing is great, the illustrations are decent (nothing to write home about), but overall, it's just a fun and easy way to spend a few minutes here and there as you try out different decisions to see what happens. For fans of this kind of reading, it's an easy five stars.

Do you remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books from your childhood/teenage years? They were amongst some of the most popular books in the library when I was in Primary School....all the cool kids had one! So when I stumbled across this book I had to have it. Now. Right now. And thanks to the magical power of Amazon, I could have it almost now. This isn't really a book I can review in great detail because, well the ending is different depending on the path you choose! The fun with these type of books is every choice you make influences how the story progresses and how far you get in evading zombies, helping the military or meeting a grisly end! As such, you can't really determine when you have 'read' this book in it's entirety (unless you get a little bit anal and track which paths you have and haven't chosen and mark them off - I didn't go THAT far). However, that also means that you can pick it up at any time, read one 'path' and come back to it again and again. The writing style is kinda 'blokey' and a little sexist towards women in some places, but hey, this is a pure fun book - and I loved it!

"Can You Survive the Zombie Apocalypse?" ist nichts anderes als ein Abenteuer-Spielbuch (dieses Genre ist auch bekannt als Choose-Your-Own-Adventure oder meinetwegen Soloabenteuer). Ich erinnere mich noch sehr lebhaft daran, dass gerade in den 80ern dieses Genre mit Serien wie "Einsamer Wolf", "Merlins Zeitmaschine", den Fighting-Fantasy-Books oder auch "D&D: Abenteuer Ohne Ende" ziemlich boomte, ebenso, wie viele Rollenspiele auch Soloabenteuer auf den Markt brachten. In den letzten 20 Jahren ist das Abenteuer-Spielbuch-Genre etwas verschwunden, vermutlich auch, weil beispielsweise Computerspiele stetig besser wurden. Letztlich läuft so ein Buch folgendermaßen ab: man liest einige Seiten, dann wird man vor eine Entscheidung gestellt und hat mehrere Alternativen zur Auswahl - man blättert dann zu der zur gewählten Alternative passenden Seite und liest dort weiter. So geht es halt von Entscheidung zu Entscheidung immer weiter, bis man irgendwann durch die Geschichte durch ist. Nun, ganz ähnlich wie Zombies selbst beweist das Spielbuch-Genre, dass es dann doch nicht ganz tot zu kriegen ist... denn "Can You Survive the Zombie Apocalypse?" ist überraschend unterhaltsam! Ich muss gestehen: ich habe mir dieses Buch eher so als Kuriusom zugelegt... die Vorstellung, knapp 25 Jahre nach der von mir seinerzeit innig geliebten "Einsamer Wolf" Serie nochmal so ein Soloabenteuer zu spielen / zu lesen fand ich schon etwas befremdlich. Aber einmal angefangen merkt man: es macht nach wie vor Spaß. "Can You Survive the Zombie Apocalypse?" geht, man denkt es sich, um die gerade schwerstens angesagten Zombies. Ganz im Stil diverser Zombie-Filme kämpft man sich nach dem Ausbruch der Zombie-Epedemie aus dem in Rekordzeit völlig überrannnten Manhattan. Hier geht es dann in die vollen, und die zu lesenden Stories enthalten ALLE Klischess, die man hier erwartet: schießwütige Marines, verzweifelte Zivilisten, überforderte Regierungsvertreter, Hell's Angels und natürlich Zombies, Zombies und nochmal Zombies. Die Geschichten sind dabei durchaus hart und ulkig geschrieben, und fernab von political correctness geht es, dem Genre angemessen, heftig zur Sache: es wird gemordet, massakriert, Heroin geschossen und was auch immer. Im Klartext: das Spielbuch-Genre ist hiermit definitiv erwachsen geworden. Was allerdings noch viel wichtiger ist: wenn man den entsprechenden Humor hat ist "Can You Survive the Zombie Apocalypse?" erstaunlich ulkig geschrieben. Die Dialoge sind oft sehr pointiert, und wenn Nerds bei einem Zombie-Walk ersthaft diskutieren, an welchen Genre-Klassiker der gegenwärtige Zombie-Ausbruch erinnert oder Hell's Angels ihre kriminelle Vita vergleichen passt es exzellent zum zynischen und augenzwinkernden Genre. VErfilmt könnte ich mir manche Storylines dieses Buches sehr unterhaltsam vorstellen! Die einzelnen Passagen sind eher lang, also 3-6 Seiten, wesentlich mehr, als es bei vergleichbaren Büchern aus den 80ern waren, wo meistens nach jedem Absatz eine Entscheidung anstand. Alles in allem: so ein Spielbuch ist anno 2011 eine komische-nostalgische Erfahrung. "Can You Survive the Zombie Apocalypse?" ist aber enorm unterhaltsam, ist von einem echten Fan und Experten verfasst und nimmt das Genre "Zombies" dabei gekonnt und locker auf die Schippe. Die Aufmachung ist klasse, das Buch ist angenehm dick und für den eher moderaten Preis kann man das Werk durchaus empfehlen. Für Fans von Zombie-Fiktion ein echter Spaß!

This book is pure, simple fun. I was a little concerned that it would tend towards boys/guys based on the cover but this means little when enjoying the book. Simply put, you get to decide over what you will do in a variety of situations and you either live (sometimes live in waiting for a rescue) or die (usually as dinner to zombies) based on the decision. If you grew up with Montgomery's choose your adventure books, you have to read this book. It's like this genre of books grew up with you and this is distinctively adult. Not necessarily for kids as the flavour is distinctively adult... not lewid or anything like that but more graphic in describing the situations. Anyhow, a very good read!