I picked up my copy of The Rage Plague at Permuted Press’ table a few months ago during the Horror Realm convention here in Pittsburgh. I had some extra money to burn and was about to take off for the day, and I was a bit indiscriminate in my choices. I wanted new books to read and didn’t take much time choosing them, picking titles willy-nilly and hoping my usual luck with finding good reads would hold out.
To be perfectly honest, one of the reasons why I picked The Rage Plague was its cover. I’m a sucker for well-done, minimalist covers, especially when the fonts catch my eye. I’ve been deceived by attractive covers before (by a whole series, once, whose red and white stylings in no way held up to my expectations of its actual contents), but The Rage Plague’s simplistic bloody hammer against a white background called out to me in a way I couldn’t ignore.
What I found, after cracking the book open, didn’t exactly delight me but it certainly wasn’t a bad choice on my part.
The Rage Plague is a story most horror aficionados have witnessed before. A group of survivors find themselves stranded in a city that’s been reduced to rubble and uninhabitable structures, overrun with creatures that attack and devour the living. There are many places a fanatic can go on the Internet to argue whether or not fast-moving, psychotic people who’ve mindlessly abandoned their former lives truly are zombies, but this is not one of them. For the sake of simplicity, I’m just going to refer to them as Infected.
The Infected are incredibly violent, swift-footed and ravenous, suffering from a tunnel vision that prevents them from doing much besides assaulting, murdering and devouring the living. At the start of the novel, hero and main focal point Bill is stuck on the roof of a local school with a handful of other uninfected survivors. They’re trapped there, with the sun beating down and the mad Infected surrounding the building. Among the other survivors are a kindly woman a few years Bill’s senior, some random women, a man who’s barely able to hold it together after the death of his wife and a young hothead ready to take Bill on for control of the group.
Elsewhere, one Infected, who has managed to retain most of his sanity despite the virus’ effects, rises to control the horde, while the military fortifies Chicago’s now-abandoned airport as their new de facto base.
It’s an interesting premise, though as has been stated before it is by no means fresh or unique. The characters feel like cliches that have been fleshed out a bit more in an attempt to appear original, but they still resemble their former selves. You have Middle Aged Man Who Rises to the Challenge, Young Tough Who Challenges Our Hero, Cigar-Chomping Army Man Who Yells At Everyone, Kindly Older Woman Who Teaches Patience, Moron Who Does the Wrong Thing For Love and, of course, Evil Villain Who Was Invisible in His Former Life and Now Wants the World to Pay.
Just because the characters are familiar doesn’t mean they don’t work. They do, for the most part. The story’s enjoyable, and the plot moves at a decent pace. It’s just that the novel doesn’t do anything anyone hasn’t seen before. Sometimes we pick up books to be exposed to new ideas or ways of thinking, and sometimes we pick up books to be entertained. The Rage Plague has loads of entertainment value. It’s packed with action, snappy dialogue and tense situations. However, most readers will have an idea of where the story is headed, and how it will end, after reading the first chapter or two.
The Rage Plague is, at its core, the zombie equivalent of the Summer Beach Read, a piece of exciting, entertaining fluff that feels as familiar as it does thrilling, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
3/5
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