Rot & Ruin: Volume 1 (Rot & Ruin, #1)

by Jonathan Maberry

In a post-apocalyptic world where fences and border patrols guard the few people left from the zombies that have overtaken civilization, fifteen-year-old Benny Imura is finally convinced that he must follow in his older brother's footsteps and become a bounty hunter.

• ISBN10: 1442402334
• ISBN13: 9781442402331
• Publish Date: 3 May 2011 (first published 14 September 2010)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Simon & Schuster
• Edition: Reprint ed.
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 480
• Language: English

Reviews

[alindstadtcorbeax]

Really enjoyed this. Can’t wait for the next; it’s in my amazon cart as I write this :-D

I love the characters in this book! When they smile, I smile. When they cry, I tear up. Etc., etc.

Sigh. Maybe more of a review later? Right now I just feel... satisfied and excited at the same time. :-)

[Hillary]

This book was AMAZING!! I can't believe that it took me this long to read it. I have been getting more and more into young adult lately. I admit at first I turned my nose up at this genre, but now I love it! It just goes to show that you shouldn't judge a genre until you have read a few books from it.

I am also getting more into the whole horror genre. That also is not something that I would pick up but with us finally into the dark and gloomy Cleveland winter I thought why not?

First of all, I have to say I loved the people in the story nd how the author chose to write them. They have fully fleshed out characters that had the full range of feelings and had me rooting for them.

I also loved how the author included the world building in this story. Sometimes the world building part of the book is a pain in the ass to get through. Not all authors have the skill to make it enjoyable, but I loved reading about Mountainside and how the people lived there.

I think I fell in love with Tom the most. The Tall quite dangerous bounty hunter that had compassion. Before I read this book and even while watch shows like the walking dead, I was like ZOMBIE DIE! But Tom Explanation about how they used to be humans made me think different. All of the living dead USED to be people and deserved respect and to be put at peace. Now until I die, I will be forever changed in how I view zombies.

Spoiler alert This book almost broke my heart when I thought Tom was killed in that shootout and eaten by zombies. But damn that twist where he comes back, and he is ALIVE OMG I screamed for joy.

The author is so skilled that I could feel for the full range of emotions with Benny. You know how some chapters you struggle to connect with? Not so with Benny. I felt everything he did, and I was rooting for him to pull through. I know this is a series, so he HAD to live, but I imagine when I had read this when it first came out I would had been terrified.  I loved Benny but I wish Tom were real so I could date him lol. That is how much I enjoyed Tom character.

Needless to say, I already have Dust and Decay on my Kindle, and I see that Scribed has the full series also. Although with its stupid three book limit I guess I will just stay with the library ebooks on this one. I am looking forward to seeing what happens in Dust and Decay.

 This review was originally posted on Adventures in Never Never Land

[layawaydragon]

When zombies went big, I went “eh”. I didn’t read World War z until years after the movie. While I have few loves like WWZ, I’m not that big into the genre in general. But I will say The White Trash Zombie series is hilarious and the protagonist is a favorite.

However, this series caught my eye and has been waiting since 2012 on my TBR (two years after publication). To make it worse, I somehow have a copy of the third installment Flesh & Bone on my shelf. (Maybe I thought it was the first book???)

Finally, though I could deny Rot & Ruin no more; it was free on Riveted Lit for a limited time.

The Good:
+Centers on the original questions of the genre: society & humanity
+Character progression
+Action
+The setting
+The ending
+Love triangle subverted

The Bad & The Other:
-Took a while to get into
-That fucking card!!
-Plot path is mostly obvious
-Girls reduced in fights to let boys shine
-Brothers being half-Japanese is merely a vehicle for the tropes: Katanas Are Just Better, Samurai Cowboy

Rot & Ruin follows two brothers living in a settlement 15 years after the zombie apocalypse. They’re half-Japanese on their father’s side. The older one, Tom, looks like it and wields a katana like a mystical badass, of course. Benny looks white and says the only cool thing about his brother is the katana.

It has many of the zombie genre standards but it’s not tired for me. It took a long time to get into because the building was laboriously slow. It pays off though because one of the main reasons I’d continue the story is for this setting.

Not only do I like how the Rot & Ruin and the settlement are set-up, how people reacted was fantastic.

Rot & Ruin focuses on the being human part better than any other zombie story I’ve read. (though I haven’t read many, to be fair.)

The family business (which was actually a short story that spawned this tetralogy) is unique and touching. I like how it takes us through Benny’s initial mindset that mirrors how people see zombies today to a more thoughtful and nuanced position.

Once things are set up, the dominos start falling and they don’t stop. It’s an action-packed adventure that has the zombie mayhem fans crave. But towards the end, the action scenes consisted of boys saving the girls, despite their fighting ability.

Which brings me to the one damn thing that still pisses me off. It’s the thing I think of first now when it comes to Rot & Ruin.

Zombie Cards are bought and traded in Rot & Ruin. The feature bounties, hunters, and legends. There’s some featured at the end of the story drawn by Rob Sacchetto.

In the book, The Lost Girl is FIERCE. Benny is memorized by her power and eyes in the drawing. But what did Rob Sacchetto draw instead:



WTF is this sexualized nonsense? He even tagged it as Zombie Pin Up Girl, FFS.
I had to red-pen it. If I could draw, I’d make it a submission for The Hawkeye Initiative.



Fuck every single person that approved the decision to include this nonsense and those who don’t denounce it.


Bottom line:



I enjoyed it for the most part. I like where the series is going and have it on my TBR list but eh, it’s not high on the list and I don’t have a real hankering to get to it.

If you’re willing to commit to the slow build up, can tolerate the tropes and sexism, and want a humane theme, it’s worth a shot.

Otherwise, meh. And hopefully, I’ll never see more of that artist’s bullshit. Sad how that's taken over my memory instead of the story.

[Kelly]

Forget Benny.
Tom Imura



Oh yes.

[paperbackjedi]

Benny Imura and his brother don’t get along. He blames his brother Tom for the events of First Night when their parents died during the zombie uprising. Even though Tom’s supposedly a badass zombie hunter, Benny hasn’t seen any evidence of this and insists Tom’s a coward. Instead he hangs out with his friends a listens to tales from much cooler zombie hunters who help keep his small town safe. But when he starts asking questions about a young girl supposedly living in the wild, things go a little crazy. Now Benny and his brother are on a desperate mission to save their friends and they have no choice but to trust each other.

Guys, I love me a zombie book. Some of my favorite books ever are zombie books. There’s just something about the way they bring up questions about what makes someone human and what makes someone a monster that I find hugely compelling and this book was no different. It doesn’t help that it feels a lot like an episode of Supernatural either. Maberry creates a desolate wasteland in which America has succumbed to the zombie apocalypse and it’s such a haunting setting for the story and an apt metaphor for life. Survivors have created small towns to live in, away from the rest of the world which has been dubbed The Rot and Ruin. These settlement camps are actually tight knit communities of people trying to move on with their life, but having no idea how to do so. Most of the time, people live and die in these small spaces without ever trying to find something better out there and it’s heartbreaking, but also very real. Because who wants to tempt fate when a zombie horde could come along? People have a hard enough time breaking out of their comfort zones and trying to do something scary without a bunch of flesh eating monsters to worry about.

This book hits you heard with FAMILY FEELS. Tom Imura is one of the best characters I’ve come across in a while. He’s such an interesting mix of grace, honor, and obligation. He genuinely loves his little brother and wants to help build a world for him that will actually mean something in the end, that can offer him something more than just waiting to die. He serves as a great mentor and is a fully fleshed out almost main character. He’s the yin to Benny’s yang and it’s a truly wonderful and interesting dichotomy that’s explored between the brothers. Benny is a good protagonist in his own right and we spend most of the time in his head and you can actually feel and see him growing as a person as his journey into the zombie wasteland continues. He learns a lot about himself, his brother, and what it means to be a human being in a world of the dead. It brings up complex moral dilemmas in a very organic, beautiful way. There are times it does’t even feel like a young adult novel to me and instead reads like a haunting treatise on the human condition and the choices we make in order to live.

The pace is also pretty action packed and there were moments where I found myself holding my breath wondering what was going to happen next. The heart of this book, really, is the family aspect and the bond between brothers as they learn things about each other they didn’t know before. It’s of note that Benny and Tom don’t really know each other well at all in the beginning of this book even though they’re the only family they have left and they live in such a confined world and it really speaks to Maberry’s credit as a storyteller that their relationship progression was so rewarding and finely revealed. There is a bit of romance in the book as well, as Benny’s longtime friend Nix is a secondary character with a crush that becomes pretty complicated, but it’s by no means a focal point of the story. So if you like your YA novels with a little more emphasis on love of the romantic persuasion, you might be a bit disappointed. However, I’m sure this aspect is going to come into play in a much bigger way later in the series. All in all, I really enjoyed the book and have already Kindled the second installment.

[nannah]

I'm not even sure where to begin with this book, so . . .

Content warnings:
ableist language
sexism
violence and gore
exoticism (possibly?)

The concept of this book sounded promising: in a post-apocalyptic world overrun with zombies, children need to get jobs once they turn fifteen or they'll lose their food rations. And Benny Imura's older brother, Tom, is a bounty hunter who kills zombies for a reward, and would like Benny to train under him.

Unfortunately, the execution of this idea is what lost me. I think a lot of what has to do with it is the book's tone, which is completely and unabashedly preachy. The book told me how to feel, rather than letting me feel it myself. It told me, through Tom mostly (the moral high ground of the book), that killing zombies was wrong because they used to be people. That I should care for the zombies. But it never actually led me through events that made me feel this way. I was just lectured on how I should feel–because the great Tom Imura said so.

On that same note, so much of the book's first half consisted of telling stories to Benny. This happened, then this happened, and it was tragic, and it was awful, and everyone should care about it. After so many stories, I really just didn't care.

Characters tended to be way too poetic and unnatural in dialogue and voice, especially when there was some element of romance or when Tom was trying to preach. The many clichés also turned me off to the writing. There were serious scenes that I just couldn't take seriously.

“What did you do?”
“What we had to do.”
(followed by a deep sigh or some sort of dramatic beat)

Another thing that tends to come hand-in-hand with the post-apocalyptic genre is sexism, and Rot and Ruin is definitely no exception. Beyond the fact that there are no female bounty hunters (you don't have to be explicitly sexist to still be sexist), Benny falls in love with the image of a young girl painted onto a trading card. From then on, he makes it his personal mission to find her–not just because he's curious and wants to get to know her, but because he has a deep need inside him to protect her from everyone. And when the only other main girl, Nix, gets kidnapped, he has another girl to add to his must-protect list.

I was really tempted to give up this book when Nix said, “Look… I'm sorry for being such a girl.” Because that really says so much about what Maberry thinks about girls in general and what he thinks girls think about other girls (or what they should think, since Nix is obviously supposed to be the heroine girls are supposed to look up to if they're reading this book). I really almost quit this book, and I don't do that often.

Okay I need to preface this next part by saying that I'm white, and though Maberry gets props for having his main character a PoC, I'm not so comfortable with the way the half-Japanese Benny Imura was treated. In many ways, Benny's older brother was like the stereotypical East Asian sage character who teaches someone rasher and younger how to fight. It was also interesting how Tom knew so much Japanese fighting terms and how he knew how to fight “like a samurai,” even though his parents died when he was very young (what was he, six?). As far as I know, no one else in Mountainside was Japanese, and Maberry went to lengths to describe everyone's ethnicities (e.g. "despite their very Vietnamese appearances, they were born in America" --another part I side-eyed the heck out of, actually).

But despite all this, there were some good things. Mainly Nix's ambition and her small moments that didn't revolve around Benny: her ideas about not being ruled by fear and expanding and moving it out of mountainside, etc.

All in all, I don't think this book had strong enough plot, characters, or writing for me to enjoy it fully. It praised toxic masculinity ("it was time for me to become a man" -- by killing people) and forced certain ideas down my throat while being unkind to women . . . and it was just not my thing.

[kimbacaffeinate]

review to post soon 4.5

[Angie]

Benny Imura: 15 years old, zombie attack survivor, has a strong aversion to demanding physical labor, and all around typical teenage boy. He puts on this show of hating his older brother, Tom, who saved him from the zombies as a baby rather than helping their mother. But really Benny is dying to know about the zombies and what it's like out in the Rot and Ruin, since the kids are generally kept in the dark about anything zombie related. To remedy this, Tom has Benny join the "family business" of bounty hunting, and it's nothing like Benny was expecting.

I'm pretty new to the zombie genre, so I don't have much to compare this one to, but I must say I really enjoyed it. It was really interesting, and I was never expecting, to sympathize with the zombies. What's happening out in the Rot & Ruin is not pretty, but it's not the living being eaten by the living dead. The living are the ones torturing the zombies. There's one scene in particular that was extremely disturbing. It felt all too real, like what might happen if this book was real life. It's easy to imagine people behaving this way toward animals and even other people. Just disgusting.

The story of the legendary wild child, man killer, The Lost Girl, was completely and utterly fascinating! I was just as captivated by her as Benny. She ends up being a major driving force to the plot as Tom and Benny head out to the great Rot and Ruin for a second time. But this time it's not for a crash course on bounty hunting. This time lives are at stake. I absolutely could not put this down once the story really got going. There's plenty of action, suspense, mystery, and a little romance. Everything that makes up a truly intriguing read.

Mixed into the story are tons of little details that added a whole lot to my enjoyment of the story. First there's the Zombie Cards, which are basically trading cards featuring famous zombies and bounty hunters. Of course, there's more to them than that. There's also the "science" of the zombies. No one really knows what is causing the dead to reanimate or why they behave they do, but a lot of random facts have been collected about them which I found really interesting. Then there's "the Children," a group of religious people who live out in the Rot and Ruin among the zombies. They do not believe in killing these "children of Lazarus" because they are thought to be who God intended to inherit the earth. I'm always fascinated at how religion appears in disastrous times, and the author did a great job creating this group for the story. Let's not forget Gameland, but I'll let you find out about that retched place on your own.

This was a surprisingly thought provoking novel. It really makes you consider who really is the monster. What if it was your family or friends that were transformed into zombies? How would you feel to have someone hunting them just because they had the misfortune to turn? These are the same questions Tom uses to get Benny to understand what his job is all about, and they're very effective. The author has written a seriously compelling novel, and I'd recommend it to anyone looking to try out the zombie genre or for a great read in general.

Read more of my reviews at Pinkindle Reads & Reviews.

[violetpeanut]

I started reading this and got about 5 chapters in and had to put it down. The main character is supposed to be 15 years old but he is written like a 10 year old! It was driving me crazy! For example,

"Nix had always been like Morgie and Chong. Now she was a girl. There was no way to ignore that fact anymore.

It seems to me that most 15 year old boys noticed girls about the time they hit puberty, which, in most cases, is long before they turned 15. That's just one example.

Benny is obviously a very angry teenage boy but the author drills into your head the reason why. His parents were killed by zombies and his brother ran away with him instead of staying and fighting. This reason is mentioned over and over again. I realize this is a YA novel but young adults can understand subtlety. They do not need to have a backstory drilled into their heads to understand a character's motivation.

On the plus side, I liked the general idea of the book and I liked how the author introduced all of the facets of the society by having Benny search for a job.

I don't know... maybe I'll revisit this one again down the road. For now, I have to put it down because I'm just too irritated by Benny's misplaced anger and annoying whining.

[inlibrisveritas]

This is a review based on my experience with the audiobook version.

I'll start by saying that the narrator, Brain Hutchinson, does a great job reading this. He has a nice and clear voice that was very easy to listen to, and I had no issues understanding. He doesn't have a ton of different voices for the characters but I still think he did a great job creating voices and I had no issues know who was saying what without being told.

Now on to the story itself. Overall I definitely loved this and I am looking forward to reading Dust & Decay as soon as I get the chance. I'm quite fond of zombie lit, though I haven't had the chance to read a ton of it, and I really appreciate when an author takes things in a different direction. Which is what Maberry did and ultimately succeeded at. The book focuses more on the emotional and psychological aspects of a zombie outbreak/world, and less about the ultimate horror and gore of a zombie attacks. The concept that Maberry gives you for the zombies doesn't branch from the lore of the main stream zombie, they are still the walking dead who try to eat anything alive, but he does give a different way to see them.

The characters were developed really well and I could understand all of them, even if I didn't agree with their points of view. At first I wasn't fond of Benny Imura, the main character, he's fairly naive in the beginning and really annoying but as the book progresses and he sees more of the real world I started to like him. He actually grows at a believable rate and isn't just some 2-d means of plot advancement. I really liked Lila and her part in the story, I thought it was a pretty unique idea for a character. Nix was an alright character and I think at times I actually pictured her as the Hermionie of the story, she's not a know it all or crazy smart but she does have that no nonsense feel about her. The concept of bounty hunters and how they are portrayed is also a super cool idea and something I could see actually happening. I can also see how there would be more then one type of bounty hunter and why they would be necessary.

I can't say that this book is action packed because there are quite a few down moments where things are discussed and ideas have time to sink in, but the moments where action is involved are fantastic. Those of you who are only in it for the zombie gore may be disappointed though, it's not that there is no zombie killing action but it isn't the out right zombie slaughter that you see in so many other books. Thankfully the ending was fairly closed and not a cliffhanger, but I definitely can't wait to find out everything that happens to Tom, Benny, and Nix. A note to all of those looking for books for younger or picky readers, there is a fair amount of violence but it's not overboard on the details and there is also some cursing/name calling included but it's moderate.

I can honestly say that I recommend this to zombie lit lovers, it's a fresh take and makes you think. It tugs at your emotions all the way to the end. I'll probably end up buying a hardback version of this book so I can read it again later and have that awesome cover on my shelf.