Showing posts with label Paul Zindel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paul Zindel. Show all posts

Sunday, December 27, 2015

Rats by Paul Zindel


Rating: WARTY!

The blurb made this novel sound like it was a young adult story but it really isn't. There's a level of gore in it which is obnoxious. I got the impression that the author was disturbingly in love with describing the demise of people rodently chewed, mouse-masticated, in a word: eaten by rats. And he wasn't anywhere near as entertaining as Eric Idle. After only one disk in this audio book on CD, I couldn't stand to listen to any more, and I refuse to recommend something this obsessive. The author knows quite literally nothing about rats and worse, he ascribes to them superhuman powers. His descriptions are not even consistent.

The plot begins around a landfill which is being paved-over to make way for development. Something - which may well be explained later in the novel, but which wasn't at the point I quit, makes the rats grow, swarm, and essentially turn into zombies. They immediately start attacking the residents of the nearby residential neighborhood. This story read like bad fanfic and it was laughable - and not in a good way.