Book Review: Roads Less Traveled: The Plan
Review by Jamie Brownlie
In the world of Roads Less Taken: The Plan the dead have risen and society has crumbled. While most of humanity stumbles around in a blind panic, a girl named Kasey has a plan for such a catastrophe: an isolated, well stocked home in the mountains of West Virginia. Of course, things don’t go as planned, because humanity sucks in a crisis, zombies don’t care about your feelings and small children die easily.
Aside from a few problems I’ll mention later, this is actually a pretty decent read. While I’m not sure I can accept that a rational person would actually have a fully implemented “Zombie Plan,” the survivalist angle made for a pretty interesting and original set-up that let the author, C. Dulaney, skip a lot of the usual (and often clichéd) back story and get straight to the slaughter. Dulaney, who according to her bio on the Permuted Press website is an avid hunter, obviously understands gun play and works it confidently and fairly realistically into the action. Little details, like counting bullets and collecting empty shell casings for reloading, grounds things in reality and helps give the story a believable feel. Also, she gives her hero, Kasey, an interesting choice of guns. They’re interesting not because they’re over the top Big Fuckin’ Guns (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but because they’re a collection of odd caliber rifles that a real hunter and shooting enthusiast would have. It’s just a bit more reality to help cancel out the absurdity that comes with something as absurd as a zombie apocalypse.
At first glance Roads Less Taken: The Plan seems to cover the same ground as countless other zombie books and movies, and to a degree it does. Like every other walking dead story, it deals with zombies, survivors and the clashes the survivors have with the walking dead and their fellow humans. Because this element is present in all zombie tales, the author has to bring something new to the table or the story ends up being just another faceless and bland entry in the ocean of zombie stories. Happily, Dulaney does this. She has a young and contemporary writing style which is something you don’t run across every day in professional novels. At first, the writing struck me as amateurish. Not incompetent, mind you, just not as tight and fine-tuned as you’d expect to find in a published novel. It reminded me of a really good college creative writing submission or a great piece of fan fiction. The talent’s there, it’s just still really raw, and with that rawness came one of the problems I mentioned earlier: the narration. One moment it would be strong and mature, which complemented the implied maturity of the main character, and the next it would use phrases and expressions more suited to a high school or college kid. It’s a minor complaint but I found it jarring and, frankly, fairly off-putting. However, my dislike of it might say more about me and my ever increasing age than about the writing style.
My other quibble was that, early on, I found some of the character’s interactions and motivations confusing. Most of these issues are smoothed out as the story develops, but at first they were problematic for me. I didn’t understand why some characters disliked other characters, the friction between them wasn’t adequately explained, and I wasn’t sure to what degree other characters were linked, whether it was romantic or platonic. As I said, most of this is ironed out as the book goes on, but it made me hesitant to like certain characters because their motives were unclear, not in a “is this person good or evil way,” but in a “why would a person react like that” sort of way. I think this can be chalked up to an inexperienced writer and not a lack of talent, and it’s a skill I foresee Dulaney having no problems mastering this in the future.
When you come down to it, this is a fun and exciting novel, especially from an author new to the profession. Dulaney obviously has skills, even if they are raw and still developing. Is Roads Less Taken: The Plan a great zombie tale? No, but it’s good enough that I want to read the sequel and I’m exciting to see what the future holds for the author.
Oh yeah, one last thing: the hero listens to Nickelback. Nickelback? Really? Man, I’m getting old.
