PART IV: BOOKS - A5 P4b


Harry was out and wanted smokes; Helen volunteered to get him a pack and herself a bottle of wine. Yup, we're going there. With all the bizarre commentary, Harry didn't think if was safe for her to go the store alone (in the car). So the whole family got in their car. Harry and Helen bicker with Karen in the back, being silent - thinking.

Once arriving at their local market - they find the place empty, devoid of life.

"An overturned cart near the entrance. Groceries scattered and smashed. Red wine soaking the pavement."

A normal person would see this and be very cautious - not Harry, his thought it would mean less waiting in the line for checkout. It is a Friday night, the place should be packed.

This is where we are presented with a 'what if' - Karen knew something was amiss. She asked to remain in the car while her folks bought the cigarettes. Harry said "of course not". And that sealed her death, since time was spent running, the three of them. When it could've been much faster if there was only two.

That said... the three walked into the grinder.

Karen saw the first bodies and thought it was more wine on the floor. It's not. Child's naivety...

"They stand up and move towards her and she has a wild urge to greet them. Hello, who are you? Where did you come from? What are you here to show us?"

The family flee from the market before they could get cornered and into their car, but Harry in his attempt to leave the location, crashed their car into another car in the parking lot. Yeah, didn't even leave the store. The car has a rollover, windows shattered. One of the dead reach in for someone - grabbing Karen's arm and biting. You know the rest.

It covers her death and resurrection. As I wrote earlier, it's okay. Doesn't really add much to the mythology.

But...

This story hints that perhaps Karen is mentally handicapped, not explicitly but in her thoughts, words.

13) "Williamson's Folly" by David J. Schow. This is set in 1968 in Williamson, Nebraska; running parallel to the movie if you like. We follow various residents who encounter the undead epidemic from the start. The main characters are Dr. Manny Steckler of the Williamson General Clinic and Sheriff Joseph Delaney as they deal with incredible events. Things come to head with the military trying to keep it from spreading further.

The place is nuked to keep it from infecting other townships and cities. But as we know - it didn't stop the infestation. The nuclear option for "sterile condition" is code named Anubis. An inside joke. As mentioned before, the film's original name was "Night Of The Anubis" changed by their distributor to what we have today.

You see Williamson, Nebraska was the recipient of a trophy, a long distance one. Before the Venus Probe could arrive back to Earth, NASA signed its self-destruction. Yes. BUT...

A fragment of that long distance exploratory gadget had come back. And cashed landed upon their local Credit Union bank in the afternoon. Nobody got hurt, but the place had to close "due to unforeseen circumstances".

"The object resembled a nose cone about two feet in diameter. Shiny, still-warm factory-rolled steel with the kind of rivets you see on jet airplane wings. Contact with oxygen at high speed had burnished the metal and left sooty charcoal-colored streaks. The underside was concave and featured a scorched docking collar (it reminded Delaney of a septic tank join) girded by concentric, tubular metal ribs. Stamped on the outermost rib was Made In USA."

Debris was part of the probe's detector. It was in fact NOT radioactive. As scanned by Dr. Steckler's, old geiger counter. I'll cover this in a moment. Schow give a different reason for the ghoul resurrection, something I had not thought about before.

The first dead person to come back to life happened that afternoon at 4:21pm inside the morgue, locker number two - the man that once was Paul "Sonny" Brickland. One of six who were in the morgue. It happened so fast, it could not be contained. By the way, they're near Michigan.

Because of Dr. Steckler's inquests - attention is drawn on Williamson. And because their newspaper's article on the fallen probe piece. It went national... providing a much needed cover story.

The military comes into town. Not so much helping the residents; Sheriff Delaney demands answers and is taken away to see the C.O., Captain Fletcher.

We get two interesting reveals.

1) As mentioned before - wreckage was not radioactive. Explosion of the probe did NOT cause the pandemic.

Yes, we had reports from California, Boston, New York City, all over. But the satellite crashed in Williamson, Sheriff. Your own newspaper had already posted stories on the wire services. It was exactly the kind of story we needed to explain what was happening, in order to stave off major panic for as long as possible.
- Captain Fletcher

2) The bigger one. Fletcher continues...

Nope - nothing reported yet [bio-war spill or some military screw-up]. No ground zero. It's not from space unless it's a [I]cosmic ray belt that saturated the entire planet at the same time.
This had not occurred to me until reading that page. It had been done before, twenty-five years earlier. *nods*

In 1992 [B]Bantam[B] published Al Sarrantonio's "Skeletons". The paperback (with embossed cover) retailed for $4.99. I have a copy, bought when new - from a book store at my local mall that no longer exist. The store, not the mall. Not all malls are dead, mine is still active. Granted, not the same foot traffic as it was in the 1990s, anyway...



In Moscow, the sound of bones echoes across Red Square. In America, skeletons patrol the streets of Manhattan and blood stains the cornfields of the Midwest. While in Washington, D.C., Abraham Lincoln is heading for his third term in the White House. The best - and worst - of humanity are back with a vengeance, a skeletal army hell-bent on conquering the living and uniting the world under the banner of the dead. Against this bloody backdrop of global horror, a small group of refugees find themselves drawn together by a single vision and a shared fate: to determine whether the last two humans on earth will survive - or join the ranks of the newly risen.
- novel back cover

The idea is a cosmic cloud was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. This massive, massive cloud is in a long orbit around our galaxy, millions of years for each full rotation. It has a unique property.

It raises the dead. And now it's back, surrounding Earth for some time.

The dead in skeletal form with the person's shape outside of it, a transparent image of the person that once was - this has mass, they can wear clothes. The dead revived have all their memories before they passed intact. But an intense hatred for the living, imbedded. The dead hunting to kill all those alive - once dead, they become skeletons. These 'people' still eat.

It doesn't try to explain how this is happening in much detail, pretty much feels supernatural. And like with Romero, just go with it.

A different kind of apocalypse novel. Towards the end Lincoln learns from Albert Einstein (White House Science Advisor) -this phenomena is short lived. The cloud is leaving our solar system. A limited time to save what is left of humanity; the living will inherit the planet once more - what's left of them.

It's an enjoyable book, not great. But quite entertaining, would recommend for a lazy day.

This should be a mini-series or a one season show, full season (twenty-four episodes). A lot happens and while could be done in movie form it would be very abbreviated, not doing proper justice.

Which means the strange radiation that lead to NASA to blow up the probe - was not carried, but detected.

I like this - Earth was exposed to a cosmic ray belt that created a planetary reset. And like Sarrantonio story, this could've happened long ago in our planet's history.



Okay folks, this is the last entry for 2018. With more to come next year. Still not finished with this prolonged book review. See you back here on January 10th, 2019. Stay hungry.