The Zona by Nathan Yocum

I've read a few post-apocalyptic books in the last couple years. Want to be depressed for a week? Read The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Want to be depressed for two weeks? Read The Road by Cormac McCarthy then watch a movie called The Road. Want to depress your son for life? Name him Cormac.

I recently read The Walk by Lee Goldberg and liked it. One of the better ones was Run by Blake Crouch. I'd review it, but I read it last year and have slept since then (I give it Fo' Stars, Blakester).

In a doom-and-gloom move, I picked up The Zona. It had some good reviews and I picked it up at no cost (free book freeloader here).

The Zona is a thinly veiled screed against Christianity, or at the least organized religion, so if you cannot get past that, then this isn't the book for you. If you can see past it and you like the genre, you should pick it up.

It takes place ~25 years after the western US was decimated by storms and an Old West mentality permeates the region. Religious zealots have most of the control and our hero, Lead, is one of the Church's enforcers. The book tracks Lead's trek from being an enforcer to abandoning the Church.

The book was very well written and a true page-turner. It started out a bit slow from the standpoint that it took a little while to figure out what was going on, but once it got rolling it was hard to put down.

One point about the dialog: a lot of it made me feel like I was aboard the Mayflower. To illustrate how far civilization had slid backwards under fundamentalist rule, Yocum at times uses Pilgrim dialog. "How far doest thee needest to goeth?" I made that up because I'm too lazy to look up an example, but that is a representative sample. After a while I either got used to it or he toned it down.

Good writing, good cover, good formatting, good editing. Great effort, and I would read something else by this author. Bueno, Nathno, Fo' Stars.

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