DAY BY DAY ARMAGEDDON – MOVIE REVIEW BY QUINTIN
Day by Day Armageddon
“If we can just hold them off a little longer” says the unnamed main character as swarms of viscous bleed thirsty zombies were on the other side of the door. This story, told in first person journal format, kicks off with the narrator (an unnamed U.S. Naval officer) making a New Year’s resolution to keep a journal. As the days progress, he comments on his life and various problems he’s noticing in the news, mostly about a mysterious disease outbreak in China. His life gets even worse when he finds out that some signs of the outbreak have been spotted in Maryland. He is torn between joining his fellow officers at a base camp and staying at home by himself. He chooses isolation.
From the start of the book I could not put it down, I swear I read it in 2 days non stop. In the beginning it start off as him at his parents house in a rural area getting ready to go back home after St. Patrick day. He was hearing some rumors about something happening in china and didn’t know exactly what it was. He called his commanding officer and asked what was going on and they said not to worry. A few days passed when he heard something terrible had happened to a group of marines in china that went over there to find out what happened. They sent footage of the chaos that ravaged the streets, something like the dead walking trying to eat everybody. It was all over the news in a matter of hours. The first sign of the disease spreading over here was at a medical base in Maryland, a patient had BITE the doctor and seemed like he had rabid symptoms. It quickly spread all across the United States and to the main characters city. He had to go to a meeting at his squadrons base and was told he had to stay their but he chose to go back him in isolation. He made a good choice, later on in the story they were all massacred.
“I need to clean my guns”, all 6 of them he cleaned every day to make sure if he needed to use them they would work. He is determined to “wait out” the plague, but the government fails to contain the epidemic, retreating to hidden bunkers, and leaving the panic-stricken civilian population to fend for themselves. The narrator teams up with his only surviving neighbor, an engineer named John and his dog, who is good at alerting them to the presence of zombies (a little too good, as they have to keep her quiet most of the time to prevent her barking from alerting the undead to their presence). The growing number of zombies outside forces them to decide to get out of the small Texas town (near Austin) where they were holed up. Along the way, they encounter some other survivors, military, undead, and a variety of other realistic hazards that one would expect to find in a post-apocalyptic world.
One thing I really enjoyed about this book is the constant state of panic, that if they don’t do something right they might be end up “dead”. And I like it because its different than all the other zombie post apocalyptic books I have read, none of them were in a narrative journal form. Another thing that made it interesting was the abnormal amount of typos and punctuation mistakes that were in the book. I’m not sure if it was intentional or not but it made it more realist as if he was actually on the run from zombies and couldn’t have all the grammar correct. I would like all zombie lovers to read this book because its not the normal undead book that you will read. 10 out of 10!
