Genesis (The Colony) by Michaelbrent Collings


Ken Strickland is on a mission to find his family. One minute he is in School teaching a class, next thing he is fighting off zombies and fighting for survival.

A fast paced, action filled zombie story. The plot is original, (which is not easy to do) with this genre. The story moves at a swift pace, with plenty of action and suspense. I look forward to reading more in the series. I highly recommend Genesis to those who love zombies! ( )

All I can say is that I love it!!! There was only a small portion, in the very beginning, that was even remotely slow-paced, and then firing on all cylinders the rest of the way. I cannot wait to read the rest of this series!!! ( )

My full The Colony: Genesis audiobook review can be found at Audiobook Reviewer.

The Colony: Genesis is the first book, novella or whatever you want to call it, in a huge undertaking by Michaelbrent Collings. He says himself that the series is panning out to be half a million (500,000) words, which could be translated to approximately 50 hours in audiobook. The Colony: Genesis starts off with a bang. All of a sudden everyone is going, what looks like, insane. Attacking each other, running around madly, or that's what it seems like to Ken Strickland, a mild mannered school teacher. Who's first mission is to escape his school. Then throughout he meets up with others like him. With the use vivid descriptions of gore and madness, very short chapters, of which each seems to end with a cliff hanger. I was kept at the edge of my seat, full of anticipation of what is about to happen. Collings also states, in the afterword from the author, that he wanted a create a zombie story that focuses more on the zombies then on the heinous monsters that humans can turn into in apocalyptic situations. This was made very apparent When something strange happens to the zombies, they all, at the same time stop moving or attacking and just stand there. As if they are in a trance of some sort. While the secondary characters had little development. I felt Ken was explained very well. He could be any normal person that is searching for his family, hoping that they too have survived as long as he has. While it is never explained what happens to "turn" almost everyone into mindless, or are they, walking corpses. I felt like I didn't need the explanation as I am sure more will be revealed in future installments. If you are looking for an very fast paced action packed, tension filled, zombie assault, with a little more that in "normal" for this genre, you have to check out this audiobook.

Audiobook provided for review by the author. ( )

Giant insects on the windows, planes falling from the sky and students trying to eat each other. This is what teacher Ken Strickland has to deal with as his world falls apart in less than 10 minutes. Half the world's population has been turned into zombies and most of the other half were bit and turned, so 99% of humans have perished. There is not much hope for Ken but he is still alive and determined to see if his family has survived.

The Colony: Genesis by Michaelbrent Collings is the beginning of a series. It's a pretty simple premise that has been done in a lot of novels, a man sees humanity fall apart in a short period of time and he wants to find his family. This book is non stop action, it proceeds like a freight train from beginning to end and its one heck of a ride. Despite this premise done many times before, it still works. I like the simplicity in this book, I liked Ken from the beginning and even liked his students even though they were killed quickly.

What I liked most about Genesis was that the chapters were very short and each one ended with a short cliffhanger. I've always liked books that keep the action going and this one was no exception.

Though the action is the most important part of the story, Michaelbrent Collings also makes you care about the characters by giving little glimpses of their personalities as the action progresses. For instance there is a character named Becca in the beginning, she is not there long but we learn that she is a know it all that is constantly looking for recognition. I love it when characters that are hardly in a book get a good description. I also liked how another character that is hardly in it gets described as intelligent but people don't notice him because he doesn't have an opinion. It shows that Michaelbrent cares about all the characters in a story, even the less important ones.

The zombies in this book are fast-moving zombies which is a good thing for a book which relies on action, the swarms of insects in the story was also a nice touch. The chase scene through a collapsed building was my favorite part as Ken learns that sometime you have to trust people. Also I enjoyed how Ken keeps hearing a voice in the back of his head telling him to give up but then he thinks of how his family may be trying to escape the zombies and he has to carry on. One scene in particular has Ken deciding there is no hope anymore and then he looks at the other survivors that have joined him along his journey, he once again feels there is hope for humanity.

The only things I did not like about this book was that it seemed to take Ken forever to decided to try his cell phone and the idea of going upstairs in a collapsed building should have seemed like a bad idea to the survivors. I loved the scenes where these events happened but they seemed far-fetched. The Colony: Genesis is a good action adventure which is in the style of World War Z. Anyone who is in to books combining action and horror will love this one. ( )

I’m a little bored with stories about zombies. Don’t get me wrong, I like them plenty, it’s just that I’ve read a lot of them and most of them tend to be pretty similar. So I wasn’t quite sure how I’d like Michaelbrent Collings’ first novel in his new zombie series, THE COLONY: GENESIS. I need not have worried – it’s really fast-paced, it’s engagingly written, and yes, it does have something new to say about zombies. It’s also the start of a new series.

Mild plot spoilers follow.

Ken Strickland is a pretty ordinary guy: he’s a high school teacher living in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and three young children. The day begins ordinarily enough – Ken is giving a test to his students – when they witness a plane falling out of the sky. Then another. Then all hell truly breaks loose when half of Ken’s students begin savagely attacking the other half, tearing them to shreds and shrugging off horrific injuries. Those bitten also quickly turn into brutal, unthinking killers. Ken survives the initial onslaught, but knows that his family is downtown, so he begins a desperate quest to (1) simply survive and (2) try to save his family, eventually joining a small number of other survivors of the catastrophe. This isn’t an ordinary zombie novel, and to be clear, it’s not even truly a “zombie” novel in the sense that it involves the dead coming back to life to consume the living; the seemingly mindless killers are still alive, but are driven to kill in the same way that the infected of the film 28 Days Later or Steven King’s CELL are. It quickly becomes apparent that there is some weirdness (beyond the obvious) going on here. For one, why did roughly half the population suddenly become mindless, savage, and enraged, while the other half were unaffected? For another, why do the killers periodically stop what they’re doing, in unison, and pause before resuming their killing rages, and why are these pauses growing shorter and shorter? And what’s going on with the insect populations, which also seem to be behaving strangely?

There is one element of GENESIS that I should note because I think it could matter to some readers: the book ends on a cliffhanger. We’ve been following Ken as he and his companions make their way through the zombie-infested ruins of Boise to the last known location of Ken’s wife and children throughout the book and, well, we don’t yet know what their fate is at the end of the book. We also don’t yet come to understand why or how any of this happened. We just have questions, and few answers by the end of the novel. I didn’t find it unsatisfying, as two sequels are already available, but some readers might be annoyed by the fact that this isn’t truly a “stand-alone” kind of novel. Frankly, I am genuinely curious about the circumstances surrounding all this.

THE COLONY: GENESIS is a quick read: the action is very fast-paced and tends toward the cinematic. Characterization is not deep (but then again, this is a story about people just trying to stay alive and facing almost impossible odds, so there isn’t that much opportunity for deep reflection and motivation). If you’re looking for a quick read of survival horror, and an interesting take on zombies, then I would highly recommend THE COLONY: GENESIS.

Review copyright © 2014 J. Andrew Byers ( )