Tankbread in Permuted Press Authors

Mar 02, 2014 Shana Festa rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: zombies

The dead outnumber the living a hundred thousand to one. In order to maintain higher brain function, they need in ingest human stem cells. Tankbread are human clones rich with those very stem cells, and farmed by the humans to serve their zombie masters. Zombies are known as "extremely violent lucid organisms"; Evols for short. When it's discovered that the Tankbread aren't just mindless clones, a courier is given the perilous task of saving humanity.

Tankbread delivers no shortage of gore and gr The dead outnumber the living a hundred thousand to one. In order to maintain higher brain function, they need in ingest human stem cells. Tankbread are human clones rich with those very stem cells, and farmed by the humans to serve their zombie masters. Zombies are known as "extremely violent lucid organisms"; Evols for short. When it's discovered that the Tankbread aren't just mindless clones, a courier is given the perilous task of saving humanity.

Tankbread delivers no shortage of gore and graphic content. Intended for a mature audience, the squeamish may find Tankbread uncomfortable. I, however, am far from squeamish (unless there are spiders), and I tip my proverbial hat to Mannering for laying it all out there for readers to devour.

The book started out a bit rocky for me, and I had difficulty keeping up with it's momentum. The book paces extremely fast, with very few lulls in the action to catch your breath. However, the writing is excellent and the story is 100% original. The concept is sci-fi meets horror, and I realized early on that I had to really open my mind up and throw away my preconceived notions of the zombie apocalypse in order to invest in the outside the box story delivered by Mannering. It started out as a three star read, but somewhere along the way, I became invested in the story and the book ended with my four star stamp of approval. I firmly believe Tankbread is a must read for hardcore horror fanatics.

If I were to relate Tankbread to a movie, it would The Fifth Element. "Else", the three week old Tankbread traveling with the courier is similar in spirit to Milla Jovovich's Leeloo. Else is naive, and learns the way of this dystopian world at an alarming rate. By the time the two reach their ultimate destination, she is the smarter of the two. Tannering's main characters are multidimensional and in a constant state of progression. Their emotion and reactions are raw and despite being in a made up world, they manage to come across believable and realistic. Tankbread stretched the limits of my imagination further than I thought possible. ...more

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Feb 24, 2014 Christian Smith rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Great twist on the genre, a post-apocalyptic Outback road trip that reads like "Dawn of the Dead" meets "Road Warrior" with a little bit of "Soylent Green," just for flavor. (As Homer says: "Mmmm... Soylent Green.") Briskly paced with a potent cinematic clarity to the action scenes- of which there are plenty. Looking forward to the sequels to expand upon the mythology of the "evols," zombies with human levels of intelligence but the soulless undead hunger.

Not for the faint of heart or those put ...more

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