Mountain Man

Mountain Man is your typical man who survived the apocalypse and is fending for himself type of story.

Gus spends his days drinking and picking over houses and stores for supplies followed by more drinking. He frequently runs into zombies and narrowly avoids death on numerous occasions. He then retreats back to his mountain mansion and unsurprisingly, drinks some more. Despite this I found Gus to be a pretty likeable character.

As the story progresses Gus (almost literally) runs into another man, Scott, who has narrowly avoided death by serial killer. Yes. Really. We get to learn a little about the local killer, whose name is Tenner. Tenner likes to play with his toys before disposing of them. The scenes are not particularly graphic, a lot is left to the imagination, but its pretty clear what Tenner has planned for people.

Mountain Man is a relatively quick read, but jumps about a lot in my opinion. It is also pretty obvious that this novel is the start of a series. We are introduced to characters but their story lines are not resolved, and the ending is a pretty big To Be Continued as well.

The title is a little misleading in a number of ways. If you're expecting Gus to be living in a small cabin on a mountain out in the wilds then you will be surprised. Also, it is really a story about three men, not just the main protagonist.

Mountain Man is a very masculine read. From Gus' character to the language and pacing this is pretty clear. In fact there is only one female character who appears about three quarters of the way into the story and well, you will have to read it to see how that works out for everyone. But needless to say there is little to no romance (a good thing in my opinion) and plenty of action. So if that is your sort of thing, then this might just be the book for you.

Well if you want to read a diary of a guy living during the zombie apocalypse this is what you need. It records the daily life of Berry as he lives a solo existance and then bumps into some survivors off and on. The pace is good enough to zip through the book but not good enough to get me to read the next book in the series. One of those soap operas based during the Zombie times ala “the walking dead”