ZOMBIE OCEAN Box Set Book Review


The Zombie Ocean book series by Michael John Grist is a fascinating read and twist on the age-old theme of the zombie apocalypse and makes for a great page-turner from the moment you pick it up but starts to flounder in the third book as we meet the true enemy of humanity.

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The Zombie Ocean series starts with the first book, The Last, then The Lost, and The Least.

The Last finds a comic book artist who writes zombie comic story, a lone survivor named Amo wakes up to find that the world has died and he is all alone in a world now populated by zombies. Zombies that beat a mad dash to come after Amo.

Amo loads up and starts to defend himself while building defenses around his small spot in New York City, But as the battle rages on, he starts to feel compassion for the undead and starts to feel bad about what he's doing and just gives up. Gives up.

But then he discovers that the zombies were only attacking because he was shooting at them. It turns out that the swarms of zombies, the ocean, as they coin the masses of zombies, are benign.

From that point forward, Amo decides to head west, leaving cairns of supplies on a route, inviting anyone who may be alive, to follow him to the west coast to start civilization over again.


If there are any.

But Amo carves a path westward, and his journey is book 1.

Book 2, The Lost, follows a five-year-old child named Anna, as she watches humanity, incuding her father, die and start walking. Being a five-year-old, she barely manages to attach a sling of sorts to her father, because he's her father. And zombies being benign, she gets a ride all the way to the west coast.

Through it all, she experiences the apocalypse from a different angle than Amo.

In the third book, The Least, we learn about and follow an ex-Olympic bound diver named Robert or 'Cerulean.'

Robert is a young man focused on the one thing that matters to him, his quest to become an Olympic athlete, but his past catches up to him, his past of gang affiliations and what not and he finds himself broken and crippled by the time the zombie apocalypse comes around.

A man in a wheelchair, facing off against seven billion zombies.

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The Last is a curiously interesting read as we follow, worry and root for Amo, a man who had a health condition that restricted his activity levels until the night he risks it all to be with a girl he met. Instead of dying, he becomes revitalized and healthy, but at what cost?

We then follow his struggle and journey to remake America.

Anna was a bit hard to digest at first. How can or how will a small child survive the zombie apocalypse (ZA)? Well, Grist pulls it off nicely, in a pretty believable stretch of imagination.

Once we get to the third book, I was worried we would be suffering through the origin of the ZA yet again, but instead, we get a ton of background material about Robert. And this isn't the first time we've met Robert in the series.

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The zombies are unique, their intent very creative, and made for a strong point of curiosity of what exactly is their motivation?

The first book was fun even if there were moments that just made no sense whatsoever, but if you kept plowing forward, you accepted them for what they were. And it still kept the reading interesting.

We continued to experience moments here and there that make no sense in the second book and we definitely had WTF was that moments in the third book, to the point of wondering where in the hell Grist was coming from when he invented, this, that or that other big red threat.

The stories are highly detailed and hence, I loved the first book, found the second book to start to test my patience with the layers of details and by the third book, I was reading 'pretty fast' through pages. But the story is so well constructed that you can power read through content and not be lost with regards to where you are in the story or where it's going.

Yea, I was getting tired of the tedium, but I think those who love deep details will enjoy these first three books in the realm of zombies created by Grist.

And if you do like these three books, there's an entire series of stories based around the events that take place in these first books.

But I do have an interesting question... does Grist hate dogs or was he just getting inventive in making his points? In the first book, we experience off in the near wings the death of a dog, but in the second book we get to 'watch' a zombie eat a new puppy, then later, newborns dying from lack of proper care.

Being a huge dog person, these moments hit and stuck with me pretty hard.


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