Review: It All Started

It All Started by R.S. Merritt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Zournal is a read I approached with some trepidation. Several reviews billed it as atrocious, though a few offered sterling praise. I have landed firmly in the middle.

First, the premise is one that works. Twenty-something Steve wakes with a horrendous hangover to discover that the world outside his Florida apartment has gone to hell. When it becomes clear that it’s too dangerous to stay where he is, he packs up and heads out for his parents’ cabin in Tennessee. The remainder of the book follows his perilous journey through a landscape infested with Zombies.

What makes this novel unique is the humor that is woven into often vomit-inducing scenes of blood, guts and gore. Some pages read like dark comedy, delivered with biting wit, whilst others offer up throw away lines that made me laugh out loud. The author’s ability to toe the line between comedy and tragedy is definitely note-worthy.

Unfortunately, the book falls short in so many other ways. The format is presented as that of a journal, written in first person, as the main character makes his way out into the dangerous world of the apocalypse. In reality, the writing just doesn’t follow that prescription. Instead, it veers off into general storytelling, in one chapter even resorting to a third person retelling of events that the narrator would have had no way of knowing until far later.

The second shortcoming in is the number of errors in grammar, spelling and punctuation. There appears at the end of the book a note from the author indicating that, based on reader feedback, the work has gone through post-publication editing. I shudder to think about what it looked like before those changes. There is simply no excuse for an author not understanding the difference between “their” and “there”. That type of repeated mistake points to a writer who hasn’t engaged in a lot of reading in an effort to learn the craft.

A good editor would have turned this book up a notch and made it a worthy contender in the genre. As it is, I would recommend it as light reading—an exercise done to appreciate the author’s vivid imagination and humor. I am going to give Merritt another try, hoping that the style has matured. The foundation is definitely there.

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