Patrick S. Dorazio 2007-10-07

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

I came at this book from the angle of it being about zombies, my favorite horror archetype. This book does delivery zombies, in spades, but they are definitely not your typical zombie of movie and even book fame. Not a big deal, these are servants of an evil god type zombies, the ones that don't eat you but drag you to a place where their evil deity eats you. Potentially scarry stuff...nearly unspeakable, as the book states many a time, but not really.

I never read the other two titles that Geoffrey Caine wrote with Abraham Stroud in them but I don't feel that either are necessary for a reader to get the full flavor of this yarn. We have a main character who is a former military man, former cop, current archeologist and someone with a supernatural heritage who is brought in to deal with a mysterious buried ship in the middle of Manhattan. I won't go into the details of the buried ship inside a pyramid and the logistics of it-another review covers that, but suffice it to say there is a substantial amount of the book dedicated to examining the history of Etruscans and creating a whole mythology and culture for them that I did not find at all compelling or intriguing. That plus landing this ship conveniently in a place that will have enough living souls to sate its needs when it wakes back up.
I was mildly entertained by this story and found it easy to plow through. That is probably the most positive thing I can say about it. The dialogue was uneven at best, stilted and over dramatic in most places, with lots of !!! interjected in case you did not realize how dire the situation was. You get the idea of what the author is trying to convey but I get the sense that he did not try to imagine how any of it would sound coming out of his character's lips.
This is certainly not the stuff that legends are made of but if you need a few hours distraction and want a pulpy little story then feel free to take a look at this one. Perhaps the vampire or werewolf titles by this author are a bit more intriguing though.

Joshua Koppel 2006-05-26

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

This is the third book in the Abraham Stroud series. The first two books dealt with vampires (CURSE OF THE VAMPIRE) and werewolves (WAKE OF THE WEREWOLF). This one takes on the idea of zombies.

One of the main ways to make fiction work well is to get the non-fiction elements right. Don't have the Sun rising in the west, horses run hundreds of miles a day, or dinosaurs only one million years ago. This book fails at this task. A new skyscraper is being build in New York City. It is so tall that the construction has had to dig deeper than anyone has ever dug in Manhattan. They dig six-hundred feet down. New York's water pumping stations are nine-hundred feet down. At the bottom of the hole they hit the top of a pyramid. No mention is given as to how much further down the base of the pyramid is but it must be quite a ways. Once the pyramid is excavated it is found to contain an Etruscan ship. The author does mention that there has previously been no evidence of the Etruscans building ships but it is obviously Etruscan (no reason given). The ship itself contains five-million bodies.

O-kay, reality check time. We have a boat that has to be big enough to hold five-million bodies. Pretty big. Now put this huge ship inside a pyramid whose top is more than five-hundred feet below the surface. What sort of excavation was necessary to have buried all of this? No one in the book ever mentions it. Anyway, while trying to unravel the mystery of why there are five-million bodies on this ship we get walking dead and our heroes have to put a stop to it.

This reminds me most of the old Doc Savage stories where facts and common sense were completely unimportant. I really had a hard time getting through this book (I have no trouble finishing Doc Savage books) and was unable to read the other two books in the series. Bad bad bad. Considering Geoffrey Caine has also written under other names (Robert W. Walker, Evan Kingsbury, Stephen Robertson, Glen Hale) one finds it hard to believe he could put out something so bad while being so experienced. A mystery.

P. Erno 2006-02-13

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

First off I was at my local book store and was looking for a Zombie book to read and ran across this book. The cover had caught my eye and it sounded good, so I bought it for $1.50, and it looked NEW!!! What a deal!!! This is a EXPENSIVE book! So I began to read it and thought the begining was a little hard to follow, but the book started to flow. It starts because a land developer in N.Y.C. wants to built the "Highest" highrise building ever and while digging the footings (basement) of the building they find a 1000 year old ship buried(The ship is huge) and when they cut a hole into it all HELL brakes lose!!! After they open the ship up the book really takes off and is very good! I think if you like the zombie, monster horror you`ll like this book. If you can find it "BUY IT"!!!!

F.J. Flores 2003-09-02

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

This is the third horror novel from Author Geoffrey Caine. The other two were Curse of the Vampire and Wake of the Werewolf. All excellent books, especially werewolf. These are the only three books by Mr. Caine I could ever find and have had a verry hard time finding copies of any of these three books. Legion of the Dead takes place in a large city (New York I think) With the living dead overrunning the entire place. Great read. Scary fun

1997-06-17

2 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

I have only been able to find three books by this author and absolutely loved every one. I want more! Many, many more!