‘Way of the Barefoot Zombie’ – Jasper Bark (Abaddon Books)

As much as I love zombie fiction, I wasn’t sure whether to pick this book up or not... I really didn’t enjoy Jasper Bark’s ‘Dawn over Doomsday’, it barely worked for me and I have to admit to being a little apprehensive over his latest offering. I went for it in the end though. It’s not as if I had a lot of choice in the matter; there were zombies in the book so I pretty much had to read it!
After finishing the book I can confidently say that the good news is that Jasper Bark tells a story superior to the one he told in ‘Dawn over Doomsday’. The bad news though...

What do you do when you’re a successful businessman who wants to take their success to the next level? The answer is simple; you transcend your humanity, becoming more ruthless and able to kill off your opponents in the marketplace. Doc Papa’s new residential course (on his own private Caribbean Island) offers entrepreneurs the chance to do just this by living amongst a captive zombie colony and learning how to harness the single minded bloody determination of their ‘inner zombie’. Papa Doc has plans beyond taking money off the rich elite but little does he realise that agents of the Zombie Liberation Front, who have infiltrated the island, are working to another agenda entirely. If this wasn’t enough, the presence of a rogue voodoo priestess on the island hints at the fruition of a curse that’s over a hundred years old...
These three groups will come together in a confrontation where the winner will take it all and zombies will feast on whatever is left of the losers...

Before people like George Romero set zombies loose on the world they were generally only to be found on islands in the Caribbean, the servants of cruel voodoo priests. This is the zombie tale that you’re getting for your money, soulless automatons haunting thick jungle (although still having a taste for flesh) rather than swarming across cities looking to eat people. And it’s not a bad one either...

Apart from one notable exception (notable enough that it’s getting time all to itself in a short while); ‘Way of the Barefoot Zombie’ rockets along at a pace far faster than the zombies that it takes as it’s subject matter. Everyone is in some kind of trouble or other, with a clear way in which they can get free of it, and the story wastes no time in getting them towards an ultimate conclusion. Cue plenty of voodoo magic and zombies! As with any zombie book or film the emphasis is on gore and Bark doesn’t stint on this, especially in one particularly shocking scene where the course attendants are forced into unleashing their inner zombie in the most graphic way possible! Not a scene for the faint hearted...

While the ‘arch villains’ are nothing but bad to the bone (verging on the one dimensional and cartoonish actually although they are still fun to follow) the other main characters have a lot more scope for development, over the course of the book, and this made me want to keep reading and find out how they end up. Benjamin and Tatyana aren’t particularly likeable, to begin with, although their motives for being on the island were mysterious enough for me to want to find out more. As their eyes are opened, to what is going on around them, their attitudes change slowly but surely and in a way that seemed realistic as far as I was concerned. I was also impressed at the way everything is neatly tied off at the end; an island can only hold so many stories and Bark takes the sensible route of going for closure rather than contriving to move things out into the wider world.

It’s a shame then that Bark falls foul of the same problem that dragged down ‘Dawn over Doomsday’... Where ‘Dawn’ suffered from a surfeit of spirituality, ‘Way of the Barefoot Zombie’ has simply far too many explanatory pieces about the nature of capitalism (and how it compares to the behaviour of zombies) and the inner workings of voodoo. The blurb describes this book as satire but it’s far too heavy handed and obvious to succeed in this manner. If Bark had decided to ‘show’ us the satire, instead of tell us over and over again that it’s there, then maybe things would have been different...
This overindulgence also has the unwelcome affect of slowing the plot down just at the moment that it needs to either maintain it’s pace or speed things up a little. This can make reading ‘Barefoot Zombie’ a stop/start affair which I personally found infuriating at times.

While ‘Way of the Barefoot Zombie’ is an improvement on Bark’s last book from Abaddon I came away with the feeling that it could have been so much more. This book is a step in the right direction though and has got me interested in seeing what Bark comes out with next.

Seven and a Quarter out of Ten