Welcome

Hi, I'm coffeemug and this is my blog "Any Idiot Can Do It" where I will review books, movies, music and what not and hopefully soon be able to turn this into a podcast. For my first review I would like to write about Breathers by S.G. Browne a novel about two things near and dear to my heart - zombies and Santa Cruz, Ca. I really enjoyed this novel. I found the world Browne created where, do to some genetic anomaly, one in every few hundred people become part of the undead is believable. The way the society handles it's second class un-citizens is also realistic. In Browne's world people have been re-animating on record since the Civil War.


The setting is mainly in Soquel, Ca, a town just a few miles from Santa Cruz along Highway 1. Here we meet our main character and narrator Andy, a mid-thirties undead who lost his wife and himself to a car accident. Andy is unable to talk but likes to form haiku's, drink the wine in his parents cellar where he lives and watch television. He also attends Undead Anonymous meeting where the reader is introduced to characters like Jerry, Rita and Helen. Rita is a beautiful suicide who Andy takes a liking too.

The novel opens with Andy waking in his parent's kitchen one December day in a pool of melted ice cream and expensive wine. As he tries to recall why he's out of the wine cellar and covered in ice cream and wine he discovers the bodies of both his parents in the freezer and from there the story begins. Andy is pretty much an average zombie, shunned by society, his father always threatening to turn him over to a zombie zoo or worse and his mother trying to be supportive but just being cold and distant.

Things begin to change with Andy, Rita, Jerry and the rest of Santa Cruz County Chapter of Undead Anonymous with the introduction of Ray, an independent living zombie. Ray inspires the group to take control of their un-lives by interesting means and Andy and the group find themselves thrust before the national media as the faces of the Undead Rights movement. But the new found celebrity doesn't do anything to protect the group from drunken frat boys bringing a showdown that is both comical and horrific.

All in all I enjoyed this book immensely and give it 4 out of 5 stars. I would have given it 5 but I can't help but feeling Browne watched ZA: Zombie Anonymous a few too many times before writing this. Still it is a great, easy, enjoyable summer read.