The Making of Zombie Wars
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The seriously, seriously funny roller-coaster ride of sex and violence that Aleksandar Hemon has long promised
Script idea #142: Aliens undercover as cabbies abduct the fiancée of the main character, who has to find a way to a remote planet to save her. Title: Love Trek.
Script idea #185: Teenager discovers his girlfriend's beloved grandfather was a guard in a Nazi death camp. The boy's grandparents are survivors, but he's tantalizingly close to achieving deflowerment, so when a Nazi hunter arrives in town in pursuit of Grandpa, he has to distract him long enough to get laid. A riotous Holocaust comedy. Title: The Righteous Love.
Script idea #196: Rock star high out of his mind freaks out during a show, runs offstage, and is lost in streets crowded with his hallucinations. The teenage fan who finds him keeps the rock star for himself for the night. Mishaps and adventures follow. This one could be a musical: Singin' in the Brain.
Josh Levin is an aspiring screenwriter teaching ESL classes in Chicago. His laptop is full of ideas, but the only one to really take root is Zombie Wars. When Josh comes home to discover his landlord, an unhinged army vet, rifling through his dirty laundry, he decides to move in with his girlfriend, Kimmy. It's domestic bliss for a moment, but Josh becomes entangled with a student, a Bosnian woman named Ana, whose husband is jealous and violent. Disaster ensues, and as Josh's choices move from silly to profoundly absurd, The Making of Zombie Wars takes on real consequence.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spinozan philosophy meets screwball comedy in this eccentric, subtly experimental novel by Hemon (The Book of My Lives). Thirtysomething Chicagoan Josh Levin is an ESL teacher and aspiring screenwriter hard at work on a script about a zombie apocalypse. But over the course of a few days, his life takes on twists and turns that far exceed, in sheer weirdness, those of any dystopian screenplay. After Joshua discovers his landlord, a post-traumatic-stressed Desert Storm vet named Stagger, sniffing his American-flag underwear, Josh moves in with his girlfriend, Kimmy, who expresses a wish to take their romance to "a new level." But Joshua's chance to form his first real adult relationship is quickly spoiled when he embarks on an affair with one of his students, an older woman named Ana. When Ana's husband another, possibly more disturbed war vet named Esko exacts revenge by murdering Kimmy's cat, Joshua begins to lose his grasp on the line between fiction and reality. While the novel has some of the improvisational wackiness of a stoner flick, Hemon's more serious concerns are ever present. A story line involving Josh's father's cancer diagnosis forces our hero to consider his own mortality. And Joshua's complicated feelings about narrative parceled out in the form Spinoza quotations and screenplay excerpts give the story the feel of a bold, searching k nstlerroman.
