Book Review: Chicago Fell First by Aaron Smith

After Brandon sees his mother save her water-logged cell phone in a bag of rice, he tries the same when he finds his little brother blue in the bathtub. At first he believes his brother is dead - no breath, bluish skin - but when his mother returns home and he opens his eyes, they rush him to the hospital where he stays overnight for observation. A night nurse checks on the boy to find him sitting up in bed. Everything seems fine until that first bite...

One medical student braves the chaos to search for a cure...One former captain tries to right the wrongs of his past...One serial killer in the making sees it as a chance to release his dark yearning...

NOTE: Contains violence, sexual situations and adult language.

My Review: 
Brandon's mother saves her waterlogged phone by putting it into a bag of rice and later he sees her using it again. When he finds his little brother Joseph drowning in the bath, Brandon rushes to the shops for rice to try and save him too. His frantic mother comes home and seems to revive Joseph but Brandon feels the room go cold and sees something go into his brother. Even at the hospital as Joseph looks physically fine, his family sense something is wrong with him. And then he bites his nurse who is sent home and kills several people. And their bodies rise from the hospital morgue...

The actual concept of the zombie apocalypse being somehow linked to a dying boy being coated in rice in the bath is certainly a bit odd, and it isn't explained. If the rice sucked the water out of him in the way it did with the phone, he'd have been a dried up dead husk. So what happened? What was the thing slithering into him? How has this all turned him into a deadly zombie? Was it a zombie rice monster? I didn't get it and I couldn't even start to guess but either way I didn't believe in it. If you don't believe in how the apocalypse starts, that is a bit of an issue.

Putting that aside, there are several POVs in this book. There is the nurse Danielle who is working on the same floor and tries to comfort Brandon's mother and agrees to look after Brandon if anything happens to her and ex husband Harold who are trying to stop Joseph from doing any more damage. It's a promise she might have to keep. I liked Danielle and her flatmateClaire and that POV is quite interesting. A police chaplain who is former military has seen this before and is willing to go to any lengths to get onto the front line and stop the apocalypse. There wasn't enough about his story in the section of this book that I read to really hold an opinion on his story, which I assume becomes clearer as the book moves on.

However the third POV is the one that I had trouble with. Doug is an individual who knows he is sick and different. He is fascinated by how things work whether it is machinery or the human body. He is constantly fighting the urge to dissect a human to explore this for himself but his control is gradually slipping. As the apocalypse slips he is in a small town fixing a video game and is struggling not to kill the young waitress Kasey who wants to go out with him. I found this strand quite dull. It is endlessly going over his fascinations, the details of machinery and anatomy, the confusing muddled struggle with himself over dating or killing Kasey. I just didn't like it. I was more interested in what was happening to Brandon, Claire and Danielle.

This book has a bit of potential if you put aside the zombie rice monster thing. For me personally it was the Doug story that really switched me off. Every time the story switched to him I lost interest and wanted to skip past his chapters. I decided that if I'm skipping parts I might as well DNF it.

Read January 2018
DNF-2 stars