Pat The Zombie Review

by | May 4, 2011 | Book Reviews, Reviews | 4 comments

REVIEW: Pat the Zombie: A Cruel (Adult) Spoof by: Aaron Ximm Illustrated by: Kaveh Soofi

I can only imagine that this came into being based on the entire zombie mash-up craze that was started with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Aaron was probably sitting around reading it or talking about it and stumbled across a Pat the Bunny book and just put two and two together and created Pat the Zombie. While I can’t say that I have an issue with zombies infecting a lot of classic works of fiction for adults (and now children) one has to ask where do you draw the line? On this one, aside from my one complaint at the end, it is NOT where to draw the line as I did get a good laugh out of it.

Pat the Zombie is an adult themed spoof of the children’s classic Pat the Zombie. By adult I do mean violence and not sex for those wondering. Sex with zombie bunnies? That just doesn’t sound good on any level! No this is a book for zombie and horror fans who love having thier childhood infected with the virus that will one day claim the lives of the entire living population of the planet.

That being said it really does a great job and reenacting the book that was a childhood favorite to many, telling the story through feeling and seeing what is on the pages. It succeeded there, it succeeded in the look and feel, it succeeded in having zombies. That being said while it was an entertaining flip through (I can’t really say read) my one complaint is how short it was.

While I understand that it needed to be short to mimic the children’s book that it is based off of with the adult audience that it had in mind they should have further expanded upon it and made it longer. Honestly if it was 2-3x as long I could say it not only justified the price but was worth it.

Available on Amazon

4 Comments

  1. Zombunnie
    Zombunnie on May 5, 2011 at 5:25 pm

    Hi Stuart! Thanks for reviewing us! >:D

    You are dead-on (har harrr) about the genesis of the book, I *loved* PPZ and entertained myself by contemplating what other classic works of literature would be much improved by the introduction of the undead. I happened to have a copy on hand from recent use, though — I’ve got a three year old daughter (now another one born weeks before the book came out).

    Your point about length is well-taken; in this case we decided that the overall impact — how sharp the parodic humor was — was going to vary directly with how closely we tracked the original. Doing a ‘shot for shot’ remake was deemed by Veh and myself to be the best tact. We took a small liberty in re-ordering the spreads, so we could incorporate an implicit narrative, but other than that we tried to mirror the original as closely as possible. God bless our editor Veronica at Ten Speed who agreed with us and supported us from the get go in trying to make sure we could do all the custom printing and inserts etc.! Anything less would have done disservice to the idea and the original…

    We’re considering extending the story in other forms, e.g. online or in an app, in some fashion… and have a few other ideas… but since we’re both parents, we’ll see how that goes… :O

    b e st
    aaron

    • Anonymous
      Anonymous on May 6, 2011 at 4:15 am

      @Zombunnie:disqus
      Thanks for getting in touch! I hope you enjoyed the review 😉 That’s actually a lot of great information for anyone who wants to know a bit more of how the book came together!