Guest Review by Ashavan
TITLE: My Zombie Boyfriend
AUTHOR: T. Strange
PUBLISHER: Torquere Press
LENGTH: 221 pages
BLURB:
Edward Grey is a medical student by day, necromancer by night. He lives alone with the first zombie he ever raised, his childhood cat, Boo. Edward’s life is simple: studying medicine, training his necromantic powers with his mentor, Mariel, and having weekly dinners with his parents. When he finds a very attractive corpse in a park and brings it home to reanimate, he accidentally creates a sassy, free-willed zombie who believes Edward is the one who murdered him.
With no memory of his former life, Edward names the zombie Kit and tries to win his trust. Kit slowly adjusts to his new un-life with Edward’s help, though he’s still suspicious of Edward’s role in his death and is convinced that Edward is hiding his former identity. Edward is very attracted to Kit, but understands why Kit doesn’t trust him. As they become closer to one another, Kit turns to Edward for comfort and love. The fragile trust they’ve built together will be tested when Kit unexpectedly regains his memory and seeks revenge on his murderers.
REVIEW:
As a fan of paranormal stories, I had to pick this one up. I mean, really, it’s a romance with a zombie. That’s not an easy thing to pull off. Vampires are easy, the whole idea of a vampire in our culture is romanticized. Zombies? Not so much.
I’ll be honest, I love a protagonist that makes me struggle, and Edward certainly fits that bill. Not so much personality wise — he’s a fairly straight forward geeky/nerdy guy — but the nuances of his gift and more appropriately how that affects his values causes a struggle. I think part of my difficulty relating to him, which should have been easy for a geeky guy like me, came from our introduction to him. He finds a corpse that has clearly been murdered. He doesn’t call police or anyone else, but drags the body back to his basement to raise it from the dead as a zombie. Creepy. Sympathy for character? Not a whole lot. The choices Edward makes here make him rather unlikeable. Too much so? I think that will depend on the reader, but his geekiness made him someone I wanted to root for and I struggled a lot with that throughout the story.
Instead of Edward, I found myself rooting for Kit. Except Kit isn’t his name. Edward has the opportunity to learn about Kit’s past, and the decision not to is part of what makes me struggle to like the character. Kit’s personality, on the other hand, is formidable, competent, and strangely likeable. Of course the big surprise is that Kit has personality. It’s pretty clear that his free-will and style were something of an accident.
Kit isn’t a normal zombie, and we get to meet one during the story just to show us exactly how unlike other zombies Kit is. But he’s still a zombie, a gorgeous, preppie/twink zombie. He is way out of Edward’s league. Curiously, even as Edward develops feelings for Kit, who starts the book sure that Edward murdered him, it’s this sad acceptance, the reluctant certainty that Edward will lose Kit eventually, that makes Edward more likeable. Kit has style. Edward does not. Kit is social. Edward’s social activity is a weekly dinner at his parents and occasional forays to visit his mentor Mariel — a more traditional necromancer that seems to be Edward’s only real friend.
I really expected the comedic element that makes this book flow to be the zombie cat, Boo. And I liked Boo. And he was comedic. But really all the best comedy in the story comes from Edward being clueless and geeky and Kit being what you expect of a twink (or trying to be within the limits of his new zombified existence). Kit wants to go to the movies. He wants to go dancing. He wants to paint his room in colors with names that go beyond blue or green. He wants clothes with designer labels.
I enjoyed this book and it had me on more than one occasion laughing out loud. I’m not hesitant to recommend it, but I can’t rate it as highly as I’d like to. It had its share of problems.
First: The cover doesn’t read as a romance to me. I see the skull and the bloody duck and I’m thinking a ghastly horror story or a comedic horror story. In retrospect the cover does make sense, but it sold the wrong story. If I had been drawn to read the story by the cover rather than the blurb, I might have felt a little betrayed.
Second: Too much slipped through editing. There’s a period missing at the end of a paragraph on the first page. Every book has editing errors, but there were more than there should have been. An error on the first page puts a reader on alert and they’ll notice more throughout the story. Most readers will tolerate some minor issues with editing once engaged with the story, but there were enough to be distracting. I think perhaps because I found one so early, my editing brain turned on and I couldn’t disengage it enough to fully enjoy the story.
Third: There’s a flow issue in the story and how it conveys time. It would very successfully use development of habits and ongoing habitual actions to make me feel like time had passed. That’s great and not so easy to do, except then I’d find out that only a couple of days had passed. That left me really confused about the passage of time during the story. Again, this was far from a deal breaker, but it was frustrating.
All-in-all, My Zombie Boyfriend is a fun and slightly twisted romance. While undead romances are a dime a dozen, this story’s take was refreshing and honest and I think more fulfilling than most. If you like your stories with a hefty dose of laughter and a bit of the macabre, you’ll enjoy this book. Importantly, I would read another story by T. Strange based on this offering.
RATING: 
BUY LINKS: