Zombie Turkeys Review

I enjoyed this book because it has a unique “twist” on the zombie phenomenon. It’s not “laugh-out-loud” funny, but it’s quite entertaining. Well worth the time to read if you like zombies.

‘He felt great. He was full of energy, he had many hens to breed with, and he was the leader of a great flock.’
Sam Melvin is a reporter with the Midley Beacon, it’s a tiny local paper – with an online presence – run by its penny-pinching editor Lisa Kambacher. When Sam sees the two turkey hunters on the slab in the local mortuary, he knows he has a story to cover and he sets out to do so with great gusto. As the zombie turkeys multiply, Sam and Lisa are the leading media team on the ground and the Midley Beacon goes international, solving their financial woes and syndicating their work across the globe. But it’s not all good news. After all, there are those people-killing zombie turkeys heading into town…
This was a book I picked up with trepidation as it seemed all too possible it would be a ‘one trick pony’ stretching a single joke to beyond breaking point across the length of an entire novel. Wrong! It is like a bowl of potpourri on the sideboard of life – lots of subtle blending examples of humour – many of them very American so I suspect there were even more than I noticed, handicapped by my British perspective. This is a book that takes ironic comedy to a whole new level – maybe ‘steelic’ comedy…? Humour is a very personal thing, but this book hit me right on the funny bone.
‘Wanted badly: .30-06 carbine. Will trade hunting dog or wife for it.’

This is a well-written book which takes a totally deadpan approach to a thoroughly – hysterically – funny sequence of events. It is dark comedy, so avoid if you are squeamish. The pace of the book rolls along in a perfect, unhurried way – screaming up into the action sequences and taking time to enjoy the more delicious moments of humour. The story itself is a lot deeper than many real zombie books and the explanation for the zombie phenomenon is as clever as it is satirical.

The characters are well portrayed, deep enough to engage with and care about, but not so deep you get distracted from what they are doing by their personalities. They are the agents through which we see the events unfolding rather than the focus of the story. But the humour is subtle, all-pervading: like the idea of the survivalist organic turkey farmer, part of a network of such, living off grid – except for ordering things from Amazon on his wife’s credit card of course…
‘The most disheartening thing was, she’d stab one through the heart, it’d drop fifteen feet to the ground with a satisfying thud, and then it’d stagger to its feet five minutes later and fly back up fifteen minutes later.’
The downside is that maybe some of the humour is lost on a non-US reader. There were a couple of moments I thought ‘Huh?’ then decided it was probably a reference to something outside my cultural parameters. The only other criticism I had was that it maybe played the theme along a tiny bit too far and perhaps had a few scenes been a bit shorter, a bit less detail on the way the plague spread, or a couple of turkey attacks left out – it might have been a sharper read. But these are very minor nit-picks against the whole.
This is a book I can recommend wholeheartedly to anyone who enjoys slow-boil satire and does not mind a few gory giblets thrown in the mix. If you want a good comedy read, you should gobble this up!

Zombie Turkeys is definitely not your typical zombie book. Instead, it is a parody of the standard zombie book, and as such may even be destined for cult status. The book doesn’t take itself seriously and neither should you. Its relatively choppy and repetitive writing style would not work well with a serious horror novel, but somehow fits when used in this humorous take on the zombie apocalypse. In general, I enjoyed reading this book, but I was left feeling that it could have been funnier and that the plot dragged in a couple areas in the last third of the book. Although the twist at the end was relatively obvious, it nevertheless seemed suited to the book, like watching a train barreling towards a car stuck on the tracks and when the crash finally came, it left a satisfied smile. So if you want a change of pace from your usual brain-eating zombie feast and a little light reading, you just might want to gobble up this little book.

This review is written by Kathi Trumpinski, not Thomas. OMG! You simply MUST buy this book! I met Andy at a local convention, and the title “Zombie Turkeys” intrigued me enough to buy it. I read it during the next 2 nights, and was amazed how well he knew the area he used in the story. I lived in LaSalle and Bureau Counties all my life till I moved to CA in 1974, so I recognized all the places he mentioned. He’s a very outgoing guy, and beware what you tell him to write in the book when he autographs it! Thank you, Andy, for this wonderful, surprising story!

I am not one for non-fiction especially zombie material, but this was a very entertaining book. The satire kept me reading. Being from Central Illinois I was quite familiar with much of the locations mentioned in the book. I look forward to what is next.