Night of the Living Trekkies

The lead character's name is Jim Pike.  Jim Pike!  Awesome. Night of the Living Trekkies was awesome.  Let's talk about how amazing all the Star Trek and sci-fi stuff was first.  The whole thing takes place at a Star Trek convention called GulfCon. There are costumed geeks everywhere.  They are constantly making hilarious and often relevant Star Trek references.  Many of them also introduce themselves using their "character" names instead of their real names.  Sometimes we find out their real names and sometimes we don't.  What I didn't realize until about a quarter of the way in was that each chapter title is the name of a Star Trek episode. (I've never been good at remembering names of episodes for any show.)  Somehow that made the book even better.  Every Star Trek, Star Wars, sci-fi moment had the geek in me jumping up and down.

In Night of the Living Trekkies, Kevin David Anderson and Sam Stall bring the fabulousness of Star Trek together with the insanity of zombies and the zombies in this novel were great.  I'm not a huge zombie fan, but I like a well-written zombie novel, with an interesting cast of characters.  I also appreciate twists on the standard zombie mythos.  The Trekkies zombies are not your ordinary zombies.  They seem to be at first, but there is so much more.  I loved it.

If I had the time, I could have easily read the book in one sitting.  The story was engaging and the writing was fluid.  It was one fun, exciting thing after another.  Anderson and Stall knew what they were doing in creating a flawed, yet loveable hero, a kick-ass romantic interest and an intelligent sister.  The supporting cast were creative and varied.  The villains were a mix of expected (in a good way) and unexpected (also in a good way).

I think this was the first time I've read a novel written by two authors (I don't think Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters counts). So I wasn't sure what to expect in terms of writing style and story flow.  After the first two chapters, I thought I'd be able to tell the difference from when one author was writing to the next, but after a couple more chapters, I knew I wouldn't be able to tell. I don't even know if they took turns writing chapters or if they were involved in each equally.  Now I'm curious.  How do collaborations like this work?

Fans of zombies and Star Trek are going to love Night of the Living Trekkies.  If you're a zombie fan, but don't know as much about Star Trek, I think you'll still enjoy the book, but some of the references might be a bit lost on you.... Or you could watch only Star Trek for a month, then you'd know everything!  I could keep going about all the great little and big things in Trekkies, but instead, I'll just say, read the book!