Book: Bimbos & Zombies: Bimbos Of The Death Sun & Zombies Of The Gene Pool by Sharyn McCrumb
Bimbos Of The Death Sun was first published in 1986 by TSR Books and Zombies Of The Gene Pool was first published in 1992 by Simon & Schuster|Bimbos & Zombies is a combined 310 pages for both books
Where I Got It: I borrowed the hardcover from my friend Heather
Series: The Jay Omega Series #1 & #2
Be sure to check out the series on goodreads (the link will take you to the series page) and you can find Sharyn McCrumb on her website
First up, we have Bimbos Of The Death Sun!
For one fateful weekend, the annual science fiction and fantasy convention, Rubicon, has all but taken over a usually ordinary hotel. Now the halls are alive with Trekkies, tech nerds, and fantasy gamers in their Viking finery, all of them eager to hail their hero, bestselling fantasy author Appin Dungannon: a diminutive despot whose towering ego more than compensates for his 5′ 1″ height…and whose gleeful disdain for his fawning fans is legendary.
Hurling insults and furniture with equal abandon, the terrible, tiny author proceeds to alienate ersatz aliens and make-believe warriors at warp speed. But somewhere between the costume contest and the exhibition Dungeons & Dragons game, Dungannon gets done in. While die-hard fans of Dungannon’s seemingly endless sword-and-sorcery series wonder how they’ll go on and hucksters wonder how much they can get for the dead man’s autograph, a hapless cop wonders, Who would want to kill Appin Dungannon? But the real question, as the harried convention organizers know, is Who wouldn’t?
I thought Bimbos Of The Death Sun was an amusing but okay book. It’s a really amusing look at one particular fandom, and the characters really felt like real people. I could definitely people like them, and they were really believable. I can definitely appreciate this particular fandom and how much a fan they are of their particular thing. However…I’ve never been to a sci-fi/fantasy convention or comic convention or any other sort of fan convention, and I feel like I could have related to it a little bit more if I had some convention-going experiences. I also think that I would have appreciated it a little more if I were a convention person. I definitely appreciate the fan experience, but not as much as I could have. Still, it was an entertaining read.
And now, Zombies Of The Gene Pool!
In the 1950s, eight young men, dreaming of literary immortality, buried a time capsule with their science fiction stories and cultural relics from the time. Now the capsule is being dredged up because a few of those men have in fact become very famous. As a result, the excavation turns into a multimedia event. Everything goes off without a hitch until a surprise guest makes an appearance—a writer who was supposed to have died thirty years ago. Still cynical and angry, he is threatening to expose secrets the famous and the obscure have kept from the world all these years. When murder suddenly materializes to throw the agenda into chaos, one man must separate science fact from fiction—and unearth a killer with a story of his own to tell…
Zombies Of The Gene Pool is also an entertaining but okay read. It’s an amusing look at a different side of fandom and authors as fans of the genre they’re a part of. Like Bimbos Of The Death Sun, I can see the events of the book happening and I felt like everyone could very easily be a real person. I think I liked it a little bit more than Bimbos Of The Death Sun, but not by much. Something about it was slightly more relateable than Bimbos, and it was a little bit easier to get into than Bimbos, but there is something about Zombies that isn’t as entertaining or amusing as Bimbos.
Overall, Bimbos & Zombies was amusing but okay. The mystery that gets introduced in each book seemed to pop up late and is solved relatively quickly. My rating for each book individually would be 2 stars, since they were both okay. For the collection (since that’s what this is), I’d give it 2 stars.
Reading Books With Coffee 