We’ve all seen zombie movies and read tales of the walking dead too. I thought I’d seen it all: zombie strippers, zombie cops, zombie cheerleaders, zombie clowns, zombie nazis, vampire zombies; and hell, even superheroes like the Hulk and Captain America have been given the zombie treatment… When I saw the title ZOMBIE KONG, I had to see what this was all about!
Zombie Kong is an action-horror novella (only 16,000 words) by James Roy Daley that was released in January 2012. And comes with the following synopsis:
“While a 50-foot tall zombie gorilla smashes the hell out of a small town, Candice Wanglund drags her son Jake through the hazardous streets in an attempt to get away from the man that is determined to kill them. She wishes her husband Dale was by her side; he would know what to do. The good news––Dale’s alive. Problem is, he was eaten by Kong.”
Before I had started reading this novella, I had a preconceived idea that the plot would roughly follow that of King Kong. To an extent, that is true. However, the story starts with Kong (undead Kong, of course) rampaging through the city, with one of the key characters fighting for his life… in Kong’s mouth.
Despite the title, Kong is not the central focus for this story but merely a vehicle for steering the plot towards its brutal end. The heart of the tale rests with the Wanglunds as they try to evade Kong and confront something much worse than an undead 50ft Silverback.
The action and scenes of peril within Zombie Kong are pacy and any violence is real, visceral and the author’s turns of phrase are incredibly descriptive.
Daley uses a first person perspective to give the differing viewpoints of the Wanglund family and other characters to the same events; a mechanism that proves to work well within this short genre yarn.
Even though this work is only 16,000 words long, it certainly has enough gore, violence and general mayhem to keep the fiends among you happy; but there is also a decidedly chilling element to this tale too, a feat that many authors within the genre fail to accomplish with more than triple the volume of Zombie Kong, much to Daley’s credit.
Zombie Kong is a quick read but most satisfying, packing a horror tale into a neat package that comes with an ending that at the very least, will leave gorehounds suitably sated and the more conservative reader somewhat shocked. For me, it was a little short and left me hungry for more tales of Kong; which is why I was happy when I discovered that there is a Zombie Kong Anthology available too!
Zombie Kong can be purchased for your Kindle from Amazon for $1.49 (about 95p) or is free to Amazon Prime subscribers so, either way, you don’t really have much to lose by giving it a try!
