Het Madden: A Zombie Perspective (2009)

Original Release Date: November 29, 2009
Publisher: Zilyon Publishing

“Het Madden: A Zombie Perspective, Book One: Wrath 2012” not only wins the award for Longest Book Title I’ve Seen in Quite Some Time, it’s also a very entertaining read.

Written and self-published by first-time author Cal Miller (co-founder of the fledgling Zilyon Publishing, under the banner of which this book was released), “Het Madden” is a dense and very action-filled ride. As the lengthy title of the book implies, this tale is written from the perspective of one of the infected creatures (and a particularly animate one at that – more on this below) named Hetfield Madden. Het actually starts the story as a “normal” human, but once he becomes infected the reader begins to see things from “the other side.” The narrative takes Het to many locations, gives him many encounters with various types of people (both of the infected and “Healthies” variety), puts him through quite a few grand adventures, and ultimately involves him in an ending that is equal parts entertaining, grandiose, and confusing.

As I mentioned, the book is very dense. Listed at 202 pages, “Het Madden” is packed very tightly with many different locations, actions, and plotlines running throughout the entire book. I believe the reason for this can be attributed to Miller’s style of writing: the narrative is very matter-of-fact, and certain scenes like big zombie-versus-human fights or tales of back-story exposition are often written in such a bare-bones, straight-to-the-point style that these parts of the story take up only a fraction of space they normally would if written in a more generally-descriptive style.