fuonlyknew

Welcome to my Monday Minis Reviews

For today I bring you:

Bones

The Complete Apocalypse Saga

by Mark Wheaton

MY REVIEW

I’m a huge fan of apocalyptic and dystopian stories so I knew right away I wanted to read this book. I also like it when there is an animal featured and Bones, the cadaver dog, has a starring role.

He isn’t your ordinary search and rescue dog. His first owner saw something feral in Bones and trained him accordingly. And this comes in handy for many of the survivors he encounters on his journeys.

There are three stories with a new threat to humanity in each one. From zombies that morph into something deadly strange, to rats and birds that mutate and hunt us, to  the most unlikely of threats, mans best friend.

You’ll follow Bones as he progresses through each story, hooking up with different groups of survivors and lending his canine smarts to each threat.

Now and then the dog encounters people who have heard of him and he even reunites with his beloved owner at one point. But as one disaster follows another, Bones travels further and further from home.

As the years go by and the world struggles to survive extinction, Bones has a new goal, one that will take all that he has if he’s to accomplish it.

As you follow Bones, you’ll meet all kinds of people, some good, some not so good. That’s to be expected when people are thrust into life or death situations.

Each story presents a different threat and while mother nature adds to that, it’s ultimately man’s stupidity that brings about their downfall.

I couldn’t choose a favorite story. Each one was as good as the next. The author took from nature, added in human culpability, and it all made sense. These things could happen.

There are many characters and I’m glad I didn’t get close to most of them, as this is an apocalypse and a lot of them don’t survive. One death in particular, a woman who survived through so much, was so horrific and sad. Be prepared for sudden death and it ain’t pretty. The author spares nothing in his descriptions, and, while I’m not the squeamish type, his ability to help you visualize the scenes will make you flinch.

I liked that the author put the prequel at the end of the book. I was still wanting more about Bones and the short story gave me some additional background and more of the hero dog.

5 STARS

Synopsis

When mankind is visited by Three Great Apocalypses, the only thing standing in their way is a feckless but loyal, easily distracted yet occasionally ferocious German shepherd named Bones, a one-time cadaver dog with the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police. This is his amazing story.

In Bones, our hero must battle a plague of dangerous parasites that brings the dead back to life with the goal of destroying the planet. Shepherd finds Bones delivered to earthquake-devastated Los Angeles to hunt for survivors only to run afoul of armies of rage-driven rats and birds emerging from the rubble. And when mankind reaches its final hour and a pocket of surviving Indians are all that’s left of humanity, it falls on Bones to save the species before civilization is wiped out forever in Alpha.

Three Apocalyptic novellas of nature run amok, three interwoven stories that feature a German shepherd at the center of the things, three stories with so much action you might just explode reading them.

Includes prequel short story, Mongrel.

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Do you like apocalyptic stories? Do you enjoy it when an animal is a character in the book? Tell me in the comments and thanks so much for visiting fuonlyknew!