Zombie Christmas

You'd be surprised at how many Christmas horror stories I had to wade through before I settled on this. It's The Dead of Winter by William T. Tripp.

(Link)

Description:

"It's winter in the zombie apocalypse, and three men see a light in the east. What could it mean?"

Eh? Get it? Three wise men? Jesus? Dead of Winter? Get it? No? Then I'll tell you. This is a story about Melcher, Jaspar, and Ballard, three dudes that see a search light in the zombie apocalypse. Just in case you didn't know, the three Magis' names were Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthasar. There's no freaking way you would notice that, though, unless you read the description and the title and then the story and then made a blog post about Zombie Christmas and read the title and description again and said to yourself, "Oh. Huh."

Well the three wise men go toward the light, encountering no zombies on the way. Once there, Melcher runs ahead when he hears an infant crying and startles a man, who they promptly kill. Turns out the dude's name was Joey. Eh? Get it? Joseph? Baby Jesus? Get it?

So the kid's cries attract Herod, or the zombies or whatever, and the light stays on just long enough for a man named Red to come with his helicopter, piloted by a man named Donnor, and shoot all the zombies. Get it? Like when Santa Claus came and visited the manger?

The End.

Other than the weird Christmas Easter egg thing, this story was spectacularly uneventful. It is a really good example of zombie fiction that fails at even using the zombie gimmick to prop itself up. Let's analyze for a sec.

First, Melcher is a former "squad leader" for the National Guard. This means that the author probably hasn't been anywhere near the military, but that's not a huge issue. It is incredibly cliche to have a former military guy leading a small band in zombie fiction, and it also ruins the Magi metaphor. What, now he's like the equivalent of a Roman soldier? I know you looked up the three magis' names, you could have just read the rest of the page. I don't think it's too highbrowed of me to expect that. Although the names are pretty damned half-assed.

And the zombies are named Zed. Man, that seems clever, almost like you ripped it off, dude. Maybe you can give me some advice, I am writing a story about really short people that don't wear shoes and have curly hair and hang out with wizards. I'm thinking of calling them fucking Hobbits, what do you think?

The names I can overlook, but there was absolutely nothing original about this story. He described the zombies in their cars, unable to get out as if it hadn't been in every zombie fiction ever, and went on for like half his story about how they still performed useless, muscle-memory tasks. What next, will you describe that they smell like rotting flesh and amble slowly? Or that they eat human flesh? Good thing there is something else to this story.

Oh wait, there fucking isn't. It wasn't even original in its shittiness, like the other stories I review; it was an utter waste of time. I would have learned more if I had used that time to find out how many times I can blink in a minute--over and OVER.

Ratings:

Christmas Allusions: Fail out of 5. What the hell, dude? I hope you really think Santa Claus saved Jesus from the Romans and that the three wise men fucking brutally murdered Joseph. The only creative part was the last paragraph being a parody of The Night Before Christmas, and I'm pretty sure the author copied that down from his sixth grade science notebook from the time he showed it to all his friends and they laughed sooo hard!

Emotion: 0 out of 5. You can have an unoriginal story and it's fine as long as you have emotions, but the most we got out of this guy was Mary being teary-eyed. And even at that, these dudes stormed in and killed her husband and she was just like, "What did you do that for? Now he won't be alive anymore." Then the wise men got on the chopper with Santa and everything was right...

Zombies: The point of them is to be scary. They are literally like the worst thing we can think of. But no, let's just write a story where the only danger is Melchior being too jumpy and slaughtering Jesus's dad. Sorry if that seems sacrilegious, don't blame me, blame the guy that wrote it. 0 out of 5.

Overall: 2 out of 5. I'm not worse off having read this. Still, it was pointless. But don't take my word for it!


Just take a look, it's in a book, at amazon.com/author/a.c.blackhall