Two events rocked the publishing world in 1982, at least to me and my fellow classmates in Mrs. Pritchard’s sixth-grade class. One was the release of lil’ Rusty Miller’s THE JEDI MASTER’S QUIZBOOK. The other was our Scholastic Book Club finally making the CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE series available to order.
You remember those, right? They were second-person sci-fi and fantasy tales where you picked what happened, based upon questions that popped up within the pages at crucial points. If you wanted to do this, you’d turn to such-and-such page; if you wanted to do that, you’d go here. Now the spirit of those has been revived with heavy irreverence, in order to tell the story of a rabbit fighting zombies.
I speak of Chooseomatic Books’ debut, ZOMBOCALYPSE NOW, by Matt Youngmark. In it, you’re a stuffed pink bunny. Why? Why not? You’re sitting in a diner booth, waiting for a blind date to arrive. She does, and she wants you. Specifically, she wants your brains. See, she’s a zombie, and right there on page 3, you’re given your first fork in the narrative road: Stick around or hightail it?
Where the story goes from there is up to you. There’s a devil dog. You can fight an undead horde with a mop, or maybe commandeer a platoon. You’ll meet colorful characters with names like Clampy Pete and Kitty Mittens. I don’t want to spoil it, but there may or may not be a reference to “sparkly vampires.”
ZOMBOCALYPSE NOW is a pointed parody of the old CHOOSE books, but it’s more than just that. If you unscrambled its pieces and strung some together in linear form, where you don’t control the action, you’d still have something worth reading, because Youngmark’s chosen his words wisely: They go directly for the funny bone.
His jovial tone permeates every page, sometimes imbuing your bunny with battle-cry catch phrases that seem readymade for EVIL DEAD‘s Ash, i.e. “Let’s carve this turkey” and “Chainsaws for everyone.” Better yet are the 112 snarky endings, most of which end not well at all for you. Witness: “Then zombies come and eat them. You really made a mess of that one,” “In your head, you pictured that going differently” and “You totally got killed by a pope.”
Next up from Chooseomatic? The superhero adventure THRUSTS OF JUSTICE and the self-explanatory TIME TRAVEL DINOSAUR. Nice picks. —Rod Lott
Related posts:
- Marvel Zombies 2
- Q&A with LONDON HORROR COMIC’s John-Paul Kamath
- Goth-Icky: A Macabre Menagerie of Morbid Monstrosities
