Ilya Fortuna Fortuna itibaren Sahiwal itibaren Sahiwal

I've watched a lot of zombie movies and read more than a few zombie-themed horror stories over the past ten years or so. Out of them all, only two really stand out. The first was the short story A Sad Last Love at the Diner of the Damned in Book of the Dead for a particularly gross paragraph that likened castration to opening an over-stuffed Zip-Lock bag of ravioli; the second was The Night Boat, which didn't have any single passage that was a visceral as that, but collectively was every bit as descriptive and terrifying. This book gave me nightmares, which is no easy task. If anyone has ever seen the old Peter Cushing movie about nazi zombies (or is it zombie nazis?), The Night Boat is going to be a turn-off at first glance; how many ways can you serve up undead fascists in the Bahamas? The biggest difference between the two - and the book's primary advantage over the movie - is the power of the reader's imagination to conjure-up a good scare and the author's ability to invoke it through building a sense of foreboding and dread with repetitive descriptions of mundane things. Early on in the book, before the zombies begin running amok, the author describes the sound of something heavy thudding dully against the interior of the recovered German U-Boat, over-and-over, from the point-of-view of several different characters. In an of itself there's nothing particularly scary about it, but given the reader's omniscience, it's very effective in evoking the image of cursed, undead sailors hammering futilely against the rusted metal walls of their maritime crypt. The ending was a bit of a disappointment, and without giving too much away all I will say is "Deus Ex Machina." It made sense in the overall context of the story, but given that the actors involved didn't really appear at any point earlier in the story, it didn't wrap things up neatly so much as just end them. Eh, no one is perfect. I give "The Night Boat" four gory stars out of five!