Outpost by Adam BakerPublication date: January 2011
Publisher: Hodder
Format: Paperback
Buy it here: Amazon, The Book Depository
Goodreads Description
They took the job to escape the world. They didn't expect the world to end.
Kasker Rampart: a derelict refinery platform moored in the Arctic Ocean. A skeleton crew of fifteen fight boredom and despair as they wait for a relief ship to take them home. But the world beyond their frozen wasteland has gone to hell. Cities lie ravaged by a global pandemic. One by one TV channels die, replaced by silent wavebands. The Rampart crew are marooned. They must survive the long Arctic winter, then make their way home alone. They battle starvation and hypothermia, unaware that the deadly contagion that has devastated the world is heading their way...
Kasker Rampart: a derelict refinery platform moored in the Arctic Ocean. A skeleton crew of fifteen fight boredom and despair as they wait for a relief ship to take them home. But the world beyond their frozen wasteland has gone to hell. Cities lie ravaged by a global pandemic. One by one TV channels die, replaced by silent wavebands. The Rampart crew are marooned. They must survive the long Arctic winter, then make their way home alone. They battle starvation and hypothermia, unaware that the deadly contagion that has devastated the world is heading their way...
Aaaah the zombie novel.
Love them or loathe them, it is a rapidly growing genre - from the excellently written and disturbingly well researched zombie survival guide by Max Brooks, to the pretentious pseudo satire that was Feed by Mira Grant. The sub-genre isn’t going anywhere any time soon. Time to get used to it, because it is going nowhere.
Approaching this novel, it is reasonable to assume that it will be full of the expected standard violence and low on intelligence (come on, it's a book about zombies!) and that, whilst enjoyable, it will fail to leave a lasting impression. My assumption was wrong, and that is why I was pleasantly surprised with Outpost.
The setting is unusual; abandoning the typical urban high-population infection zones in favour of an isolated oil derrick in the freezing Arctic. This more intimate setting instantly reduces the character count, which in turn means the characters are better developed and the mismatched bunch range from an obese female priest who has lost her faith, to a pot-smoking Sikh, and they are surprisingly well realised and likeable. They make rational decisions and behave like normal, flawed humans. The others are generally less memorable because they appear to be there to enforce the sense of cabin fever on the rig and flesh out the story a little, which in all fairness they do effectively.
However, more interesting set pieces are few and far between and the industrial grey rig setting soon becomes claustrophobic and tiresome (though I can imagine this being intentional). Also, the actual interactions with the infected are spread fairly thin throughout, almost as if they were an afterthought. Moreover, the time between these interactions is not always well-utilised, and there is more focus on the daily mundanities than feels necessary, even if the author is trying to convey the boredom of unchanging routine.
Also, there is a slight twist on the zombies themselves, and I appreciated the later first-person perspective from the viewpoint of a person on the brink of 'turning' - it was well-written and suitably dread-inducing even if I didn’t particularly care for them, and rather than going for the typical viral cookie cutter zombie archetype, these were slightly different. The outbreak starts after an unfortunate crewman is infected by a bizarre metallic parasite which causes its host to grow painful-looking spines while going insane. This is a welcome change, albeit a minor one, and one that I am aware is down to personal taste more than anything, but it does allow for a fair amount of body horror.
There is a clever build of suspension at the start of the novel which tapers off in the middle, however this lull in pace is utilised well, and builds more on the characters interpersonal relationships and back stories. This gives us far more reason to care about the characters than many of the other books in this category, and inevitably makes each loss much more poignant, especially one death in particular (mild spoiler alert) at the end of the book.
This is a solid read. If you prefer faster paced, more action-based zombie novels such as the Zombie Apocalypse series, this might not be for you. But if you’re a fan of the zombie sub-genre, or just horror in general, and you're looking for something a little more cerebral, or you're longing for a different setting, you’ll probably find something here to enjoy.
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