Tankbread Book Review

Tankbread.

Paul Mannering.

5 stars out of 5.

The book blurb:

Ten years ago humanity lost the war for survival.

Now intelligent zombies rule the world. Feeding the undead of a steady diet of cloned people called Tankbread, the survivors live in a dangerous world on the brink of final extinction.

Tankbread is a zombie book set 10 years after a zombie outbreak. It’s set in Australia and while a world gone to ruin is predominantly going to look the same wherever the story takes place it makes a nice change for a story to focus on a different country and geography compared to the standard setting of the USA. We even get some good old fashioned Aussie slang thrown in, it’s a small touch but is nice instead of the usual generic American slang.

The story is just different enough to stand out from the rest of the zombie books out there, the idea of the zombies behaviour and how some of them keep their brain functions and mind to remain evolved is well thought out and adds another layer to the standard undead character style of mindless drones.

The story starts out with a courier being given a job to retrieve something from the geeks (scientists who create the tankbread) at the Sydney opera house by one of the evolved zombies (evol-extremely violent lucid organism), it’s a good opening paragraph and gives you a feel for what the rest of the book’s like. From there the story really picks up as things go wrong and aren’t what they seem resulting in the courier embarking on a cross Australia journey.

The plot is good and after my initial first impression of the courier character that wasn’t very promising, in a shock I didn’t see coming by the end I really cared about him and his travelling companion Else, they have a surprisingly deep relationship that grows over their journey. There’s a decent ending to, that both finishes the novel nicely and also sets things up for a sequel.

The book won’t win any awards for the story or writing and it isn’t an epic masterpiece of poetic literature. If I had to compare Tankbread to anything, then it would have to be compared with a Hollywood popcorn action movie with an above average plot, you will have a good time but at the end of the day you can just switch off your brain and enjoy the fun ride your taken on. That is in no way a criticism as I really enjoyed the book.