What I’m Reading: Paul is Undead

My wife gave me the book Paul is Dead: The British Zombie Invasion by Alan Goldsher as a Christmas gift.  She knows I like to read. She knows that I like Zombies and she knows that I like the Beatles.  It should have been the perfect gift, right?  It certainly seemed that way to me.  I mean, what could be better than an oral history of the zombified Beatles? 

But then I actually began to read to book

My initial enthusiasm quickly wore off because the book was tedious to read; all of the characters speak in the same voice.  They all sound the same – Paul, George, Ringo, John, George Martin, Brian Epstein…. Everyone in the book speaks in the same way, with the same idioms, with the same vocabulary, with the same cadences.  Everyone, that is, except Mick Jagger – who sounds like a character from a bad swords and sorcery movie.  The oral history format of this novel needed a diverse range of characters that Goldsher was unable to deliver.

Paul is Undead also fails as a book about the Beatles as Zombies (except Ringo, a seventh level ninja)  in that they’re not zombies.  Not in either the Haitian Voodoo or the George Romero sense.  They ‘re brain eating, undead creatures of some variety.  But not Zombies.

And they’re not convincingly the Beatles either…

Sadly this book is a low level knock off of Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (inserting zombies and ninjas into a favorite and familiar classic) and Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (the oral history format). 

There’s plenty of madcap violence and destruction, there are cameo appearances by Rock-n-Roll greats like Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley, and Bob Dylan – all of which are intended to be humorous.  But they’re mostly not.  I chuckled a few times as I read, but not often.

It was a great gift from my wife, but disappointing.