Hurricane Dan

A Zombie Novel

By: Bret Wellman

Narrated by: Jeff Johnson

Dan Kelly is a young businessman who has grown sick of the way things work. He has given up trying to make a living and gone on a drinking binge that puts him out on the street. A few days later, as he is trying to adjust to his new life as a vagabond, zombies begin popping up in the streets of Manhattan.

Dan and his homeless friend, Barns, make plans and gather weapons. They begin working their way to safer ground, finding others in need and expanding their numbers.

As the city spirals into a full zombie apocalypse, Dan and his friends seek shelter behind a giant police barricade. The barricade sections off a couple blocks of the city from the zombie outbreak. It is there that the survivors try to hold their ground and wait for help that may never come.

Action packed and suspenseful, Hurricane Dan is sure to be a classic zombie novel.

©2014 Bret Wellman (P)2014 Bret Wellman

Lost in a sea of competition

I won’t give you a review of the story itself because the publisher’s summary does a good job of that. Instead, I will restrict my review to comparing and contrasting it with other zombie books, and to comment on the narration. Hopefully, this will help you make an informed decision on your next purchase.

I knew my good run of winning zombie stories would have come to an end. Unfortately, for 'Hurricane Dan" I had just finished listening to Keith Blackmore's 'The Hospital', 'Mountain Man' and “Mountain Man 2”, Chris Philbrook’s “Adrian’s Undead Diary”, Timothy Long’s “Z-Risen” and Eloise J Knapp’s “The Undead Situation”. These turned out to be some of my favourite zombie stories. So in reality it was always going struggle against such entertaining books!

I’m not saying this is a bad book it is just that there are so many other zombie books which do the comic style violence thing better... you know the 'bap, kapow, whap!' sort of thing. Other books like the "Apocalypse Z Series" do the character development better, others like the 'Morningstar Strain" do the story line better and then you have the a few big name series like "Zombie Fallout series" who do all of those things better.

Nevertheless, this book will provide entertainment on a boring commute. I just wouldn’t advise paying full price for it, when other titles exists that one or all of those things mentioned earlier, do better. It becomes hard to justify the purchasing decision.

The narration is ok but it reminds me of some honkey tonk singer. His voice is unusual to my sensitive Australian ears (but don’t pay too much weight to that statement… I am Australian and we speak a unique flavour anyway). Unusually, this is one of those rare audible books in which you can play at normal speed without speeding it up. I listened to it at 1.25x and 1.5x speed and only on a few occasions did it spoil the narrator’s voice. So as a result you do get a full 6hour and 46 minutes story. This fact is getting rare of late!

The Search for Flip Flop

Overall, not bad. Barnes the bum and his never ending search for hooch aka Flip Flop and the narrator's voices made it worthwhile.
Much worse zombie books out there.