The Dork Review: Zombie Vs Fairy Featuring Albinos

The stripper's back and she brought equally coked-out friends along for the ride. Really, that's the best way to describe Zombie Vs Fairy Featuring Albinos, the sequel/next in series effort from James Marshall following his stellar Ninja Vs Pirate Featuring Zombies. For some context you may want to read my review of NVPFZ here.

The puerile humor remains, along with the gore and over-the-top violence, though this book ups the gore while reducing the violence a tiny bit. That's okay though, because even with less violence it has enough to satisfy the truly demented reader.

The interesting part about ZVFFA is it's told from the viewpoint of a zombie, the hated foes of Guy Boy Man. It's an interesting flip, and allows Marshall to create an engaging character with Buck Burger, our zombie narrator. Buck is a part of the system and acutely aware of how depressed that makes him. A part of him yearns to be human again, which invites a comparison between it and Warm Bodies, but the stories are completely different. R from Warm Bodies is a young man unable to connect to the world while Buck is a middle-aged white-collar worker trying to figure out where his life went wrong.

Both have the same issue though, in that they're zombies.

Like NVPFS, ZVFFA is a book that works in layers. You can enjoy it on a purely infantile level as something an elementary school child with access to way too many horror movies wrote, or you can see the underlying complexity and sheer convention-defying balls that Marshall is truly writing with.

But don't take my word for it, go read it yourself.

The Dork Review: Ninjas Vs. Pirates Featuring Zombies

I think I best summed up NVPFZ in an earlier post when I described it as "a coke-snorting stripper who just dropped some acid". I should probably add that the stripper has a PhD in Philosophy from a pretentious university overflowing with ivory tower academics.

NVPFZ does its very best to look stupid when it's not. James Marshall, the author, has realized the surface level stupidity of the concept of Ninjas fighting Pirates, fodder for many an Internet debate, and run with that as a veneer over-top of a book about the place of the North American male in current culture.

That's the brilliant thing about this book. It reads at too levels. If you just want a silly adventure, albeit with some disturbingly graphic violence and puerile humor, then it's there. If you want a book that shows a young man questioning the media-induced, violent, and over-sexualized worldview placed upon him by the media and modern life, then you can have that as well.

This is the type of book I expect out of Chizine; dark, thoughtful, disturbing, and superbly executed. If you haven't bought or won a copy yet, do so now. (More so the buying than the winning).