A little more apocalyptic than I was expecting

So this was another free Kindle book.  They’ve been hit or miss.  This one was mostly a hit.  I say mostly because I think it was a little bit too short.  It felt like they tried to jam an entire apocalypse into a too-small book.  I loved the story, I loved the idea of where the apocalypse was coming from, and I loved the creatures.  The characters were almost great, but they too suffered from a little bit of rushing/smooshing.

The story begins when a rat (isn’t it always a rat?) gets contaminated by some seriously nasty goo.  It spreads the contaminant throughout it’s little rat friends, and then continues to spread.  The rats then become genetically modified killing/eating machines that can only operate at night.  It turns out that the Russians created this particular nasty goo, but it’s recombined with something else to make it truly terrifying.

I thought the spread of the creatures throughout towns was pretty awesome.  It just felt like something that could really happen.  The rat-creatures eventually contaminated humans too (the ones they didn’t eat), and then there were also human-creatures.  There were a lot of near-misses, and some truly sad and horrifying moments.  If the author had given even a few more chapters to the characters, I think this book would’ve been great.  In the end, lots and lots more people died than I was expecting, but that made it even scarier.  The epilogue focused on the “survivors” of the apocalypse.  I’d totally read that story too, and I actually looked around to see if it existed.  Not yet…