of Z fiction and brains

So just as I thought there was nothing but YA romance novellas on Amazon, I stumbled upon a little gem of a Z fiction. and yes, Z is a new-fangled lit lingo for zombie fic. It took me a couple mouthfuls of green tea to figure that one out as I was browsing through the pages.

and normally, I'm not the morbid/supernatural/paranoid sort that reads Z lit and prepares a apocalyptic zombie survival kit in my basement with army rations to make any general proud. 
but Apocalyse Z: the Beginning to the End by Manel Loureiro sucked me in and I'm only 70% through, according to my Kindle.

Z lit has never pulled in into its grip on chaos and gore, just because I always thought that when you've read one, you've pretty much read all of them. 
hoards of zombies shuffling about a dead town looking for brains, a couple of survivors running around like headless chickens trying to find rations and always always always the hope for humanity's survival.
but one thing quite cool about this book is the narrator is telling his story through blogposts and later on, when the servers shut down, his journal. it's quite compelling in the sense that the narrator not only gets to describe the daily occurrences, but also gets to add in his two cents' worth in hindsight. and it reads so much like what a blogger/journaler will write: the sometimes 2-sentences post about being so sick and horrified about the day's incidents that he could not even bear to put pen to paper, and I literally feel that tinge of nausea in my tummy for him, and want but do not want to at the same time to turn the page to see what made him that speechless.
and when he described the reanimation of a dead comrade's corpse right in front of him, I actually curled right into myself and tried to read the lines through scrunched-up eyes. the narrator described the morbid fascination of the entire sequence, the feeling of seeing something so gruesome and unholy but unable to look somewhere else. and I felt like I was seeing things right through his eyes.

and the book is set in Spain and was translated from a Spanish piece of work. the writing does read a little chunky but staccato, some of its meaning could have been lost in translation. but that sense of stiltedness somehow makes this work of fiction even more realistic, brings the whole survival in an apocalyptic wasteland to a whole new different light. people running for their lives don't spend much time mincing their words in their journal entries after all. but the descriptions of the desolate setting and decaying humanity were never lost, it still flows beautifully despite the translations.

and the entire time I was reading the book, I was thinking to myself, no way in heck would I be able to survive a zombie invasion, if there ever was one. I can't hunt animals, I can't bust locks, I can't aim and shoot guns, I can't even fix a broken car. the only remotely useful survival skill I have is the medical knowledge. I know how to set bones and clean wounds and give antibiotics, but that's about it. 

I'm so going to be zombie fodder when a Z invasion comes along.

Rant post no. 9490193:

Every single time I pop open my Amazon Kindle website to do a little ebooks-internet-window-shopping, the top 20 popular books for the moment are freakin' romance novellas. 
70-pages novellas about a heroine with a dark past and a hero with a dark past. A chance meeting. Lots of sexual tension. Girl overcomes past. Guy overcomes past. And everyone lives happily ever after.
Pfffft.
I fully blame stupid Fifty Shades for the stupid, stupid fad.
Because of that mindless drivel, mummy-porn is the 'in' thing now. You want a bestseller, write a trilogy of books ala Fifty Shades, play around with a variety of dark pasts, add in a couple of washboard abs and dark brooding eyes and voila. Instant. Chart. Topper.

It's just like the Twilight trilogy which I thank God that the movie franchise is finally done and dusted and its rabid fangirls can be laid to rest.
When Twilight came out, YA sections in bookstores were chock full of vampire/supernatural fiction and impressionable teen girls gobbled up all the shimmery, sullen vampires that pop media can churn out.  
And shame on me to expect to see YA books with wholesome heroines and delicious long descriptions about English moors and such. And if I come across a YA book without any romance in it, it's probably gathering dust at the bottom of the pile, banished to a land where boring books are sent to die.

Long gone are the days where unicorns fetter across pages, young girls dream and grow in 200 pages, a boy and a tiger share a raft and a life experience, and romance was about friendship and respect and sacrifice and restrained ardor and ended with delicious, soul-tingling words from the heart.

Bloody hell, I must be getting too old for this shit.