[00:00:21] James: Hey guys, and welcome to this side episode of Books, Cats, and Chaos. You’ll notice that today it’s just me. And this is because this is a special episode that we are calling “The In-Between”. “The In-Between” is going to be used for books and stories that are not part of the deep dives that we’re doing.
[00:00:57] So right now we’re doing Throne of Glass, but today I am not talking about Throne of Glass. I am talking about this cool book that I picked up at a a used bookstore, I saw it, it looked cool, and right up my alley.
[00:01:19] It’s called I Am Scrooge, A Zombie Story for Christmas. And if you’re watching this then I’ve got the cover up here. If you’re listening to this, I will see if there’s a way I can, I don’t know if I can link to this or not. But look it up. I Am Scrooge, A Zombie Story for Christmas by Adam Roberts.
[00:01:50] I picked this up because I love a good zombie story. I love a good horror, type of [00:02:00] thing. And it’s Christmas time. If you’re watching the channel or you’re watching the show today, you can see, I got my holiday sweater here. Hello, darkness.
[00:02:17] And it’s a pint of Guinness. With snowmen, so technically that makes it festive, right? So, anyway I picked this book up for about six bucks at the used bookstore. It’s not a terribly long read it’s about 150 pages. I did it in technically two days, but I could have done it in one day. And honestly this was a very fun read.
[00:02:50] It started off pretty much how I expected with the zombies and the change to the classic Scrooge story, with the character of Scrooge basically being the same Scrooge character that you know, that, you know, from the original story. And then it devolves pretty quickly into a very what the hell am I reading kind of book.
[00:03:22] But it’s still really good. So the story starts off with Scrooge being his very grumpy self. And, well, actually technically I should say it starts off with Marley and the zombie version of Marley. Tearing apart the clergymen
[00:03:57] and the other [00:04:00] person that was with him. Honestly, it’s kind of a great way to open a book where you have the clerk and the undertaker both get torn apart by The zombie of Marley and then it moves right into the classic story of Scrooge and there is a lot of discussion about his character, his attention to working.
[00:04:39] His being very Scrooge and wishing he could just work through Christmas and being just kind of a sourpuss all the way around. The book reads very much like a a classic literary novel, if you’re familiar with that kind of the Dickenson’s and the, other types of books that are in that very how do I want to say it’s that old English, very descriptive style full paragraphs to explain how something looks or how something is operating or lots of superlatives, lots of adjectives, things that make if, you’re. If you’re more of a casual reader, this could actually be maybe a little bit, I don’t want to say this is a difficult book to read because it’s really not. It’s a light, it’s a light [00:06:00] novel. But the English can get a little bit away from you.
[00:06:07] And the way that the author did this is kind of genius because he mimics that old style very well. And so you get the idea that you are reading one of the old classics. But it’s about zombies. So the story picks up with Scrooge talking about being very Scrooge like and bah humbug and what’s the point of Christmas and all this stuff and the other.
[00:06:37] And he goes back to his residence and immediately, instead of being visited by the ghost of Marley to warn him about the three spirits that are going to visit him for being a Scroogey kind of character, He is visited by the zombie of Marley, who, there is no such warning, all he wants to do is eat his eat his flesh.
[00:07:10] And There’s a very nice descriptive battle between the two of them. And then we get to the introduction of the first spirit, who’s very adamant that they are a spirit, not a ghost, that there is a difference. And, throughout the story so you’re he’s visited first by the spirit or the ghost of christmas present and the ghost takes him through as this zombie apocalypse is unfolding through London, and there’s nothing that they can do to stop it and people are doing their general merrymaking and drinking and getting eaten by zombies.
[00:07:59] [00:08:00] And during this course of the story we’re seeing that it is having an effect on Scrooge and he’s having a change of heart because he’s witnessing these just atrocities happen to people in the town. And this is after he was accosted by Marley himself too and almost eaten. And so there’s a whole, there’s a whole just thing that he goes through with, finding out that, the the zombie apocalypse is moving swiftly through London and there’s not much that they can do about it.
[00:08:52] When they get through much like the classic story, the spirit disappears and Ebenezer finds himself facing with the second spirit. And the second spirit is a challenge. I’ll tell you that much right now. The author wrote this spirit in such a way that it is a it is a, it’s a classic type of person, and so you can hear the accent and the speech patterns as you read it, but that doesn’t make it any easier for you to understand what the spirit is talking about.
[00:09:49] And this is the spirit of Christmas future. And so what the spirit does is he takes Scrooge through [00:10:00] a series of a couple weeks, a couple months, and then a couple years where Scrooge is seeing the, … He’s seeing the transition of the world as it is overcome with zombies and how the different parts of the world are falling.
[00:10:25] And they’re not really understanding how this works and how the zombies seem to be evolving and getting smarter and crossing great distances of the ocean to get to these other places. And by the end of his journey. He basically the, whole world is doomed and there’s not much he can do about it.
[00:11:00] It is a little interesting, he encounters himself along the way.
[00:11:11] A Scrooge that has taken control and is very active in a sort of zombie rebellion. And he’s trying to actively help people and keep people safe and, fight the the war against the undead as what they say. And so. We get to the, we get to the end of the time with the second spirit, because if you remember from the original Scrooge story, each spirit basically came through and they only had a little bit of time to do their part of the story, right?
[00:11:58] They showed their message, [00:12:00] Scrooge went back home and then he, ended up seeing the next spirit. And that is basically where this book. The first part, I would say the first half of it really, you kind of can kind of follow the trajectory of how it compares to the original story, except that as Scrooge is going through in his timeframe with the spirits, he’s not seeing things that make him reflect on his own life so much as he’s seeing the zombie apocalypse as it unfolds across London and then just Europe and then Australia and other places.
[00:12:45] But by the time we get to the end of it, and I’m trying to do this without spoiling this book for you guys because I think that you really you really should read it. It’s pretty good. So by the time we get to the end of the time of the second spirit, the book takes a turn and it pretty much no longer follows the original the original Scrooge story.
[00:13:14] I mean, I say that loosely because following zombies is not following the original Scrooge story at all. But by the time we get to the end of the second spirit there’s all kinds of stuff that they throw in. We’ve now got scientific means of zombie vaccine inoculation. We’ve got a bit of time travel.
[00:13:44] We’ve got young, younger Scrooge meeting older Scrooge, both of them talking about childhood Scrooge and [00:14:00] by the time the, by the time the third spirit rolls around, scrooge has basically been, he’s been stuck where the second spirit left him. If you remember in the original story, once the spirit was done Scrooge got dumped back off at his residence and, then the spirit came in the book here when the second spirit is done. Scrooge is basically stuck in the future for a number of weeks until the third spirit finally shows up and that’s the spirit of Christmas Past, who in the original story is like a personification of death, grim reaper pointing at the grave and telling Scrooge that’s where you’re going to end up if you don’t fix your ways and The third spirit in this book is definitely not that kind of character.
[00:15:08] He speaks very very much in rhyme and hyperbole and very descriptive language to the point where he not only confuses the reader, but he confuses himself and he even calls it out and says that because of the nature of his job, his descriptive language has a tendency to get away from him.
[00:15:37] So it’s very kind of tongue in cheek, which I, I appreciate that kind of stuff. I love tongue in cheek self humor, fourth wall, not quite fourth wall, but it’s just something funny about a character realizing that what they’re doing is not helpful because they’re getting too [00:16:00] into what they think they’re supposed to be doing.
[00:16:08] And so they go through this whole whole thing where the, third spirit helps Scrooge to understand what had happened to him, why he is seemingly immune to the zombie virus because it had something to do with his childhood. And then we get just a really big cycle of time travel and, and the if you’ve ever seen Twelve Monkeys, which is a fantastic movie with Bruce Willis in it you’ll, understand that the cycle of time travel is not very easily broken. So in Twelve Monkeys, if you remember, the movie starts off with a child seeing a man run through an airport with a briefcase.
[00:17:11] And he gets shot and killed because they think it’s a terrorist attack. And that stuck with the child for his whole life. And that child basically grows up to be Bruce Willis. And then there’s the whole virus is introduced into the world. And by the end of 12 Monkeys, and sorry, this is a spoiler alert for 12 Monkeys.
[00:17:38] If you haven’t seen 12 Monkeys with Bruce Willis, I’m sorry. You can stop listening. Right now this movie is over 20 years old. So it you know, it is what it is, but by the end of the movie Bruce Willis is the man running through the airport with the briefcase and [00:18:00] he gets shot and killed and as he’s dying he looks over and he sees the child which is himself and that the cycle the time cycle Is it strives to stay the way that it is, right?
[00:18:20] And so there’s going to be a loop forever of young Bruce Willis seeing old Bruce Willis, who came back to the past, die because he was trying to inoculate everybody before the virus outbreak when he was an adult and then that kid grows up and then the cycle continues, and so we have that same sort of premise in this story which was a very interesting sort of twist I mean it came out of right field for a Scrooge book or a book that you know, it’s about Ebenezer Scrooge, and so you have Older Scrooge realizing that something that happened to him as a child that traumatized him was because of him coming back to the past through the aid of the, Ghost of Christmas the Ghost of Christmas Past.
[00:19:31] And so you can see this cycle of the trauma and them trying to stop the zombie outbreak, getting all the way up to the warning that we get in the beginning of the book, but it doesn’t work. And it’s just funny to, as you read it and you realize what’s happening and you’re like, Oh, they’re stuck basically stuck in a time loop.
[00:19:54] Kind of. I’m not. I’m not giving away the end of the book. That’s not how the book ends. [00:20:00] It’s not stuck in a time loop, but you can see how this works and there’s a very interesting kind of plot twist at the end with the I say quote unquote bad guy I mean he is the bad guy, but it’s not what you would expect from this story at all and the book definitely ended on a very different note than I was thinking.
[00:20:33] I kind of thought that it was going to wrap up in a very clean different way and, it really didn’t there’s a lot of explanation that goes into about why the zombie outbreak happens on Christmas day and how Christmas itself is a sort of watered down version of the original event which was a zombie outbreak and how the Christmas carols are watered down versions of things that had darker meanings and Even goes as far as to talk about the way that the three spirits of Christmas, present, past, and future, how they all played a part in the original Christmas story, with Bethlehem.
[00:21:44] So it was kind of an … Like I said the first half of the book followed a very clear sort of formula for turning the Scrooge story into a zombie story, and then the second half of the book [00:22:00] said, forget everything that you just read and we’re going in a completely different direction now.
[00:22:05] And honestly, like I said, it’s a very fun read. It was only 150 pages. I finished it in a day. Not even a full day, actually. I zipped through this in basically half a day. I read the first two chapters one night, and then I spent, like, a couple hours, two or three hours finishing the book. So if you’re looking for something fun, yeah, and you’re, wanting to take a break from maybe reading something really heavy, or like me, if you’re in the middle of reading the Throne of Glass series I just finished Heir of Fire and I was thinking, well, let me like read something else before I really start to dig deep into the next book.
[00:23:02] This was perfect. And I, like I said, I found it at the used bookstore. It was six bucks. Find a copy of it if you can get it on Kindle. I don’t know how much it costs, but I’ll see if I can find a link to it on Amazon, Kindle or wherever, and I’ll put it into this episode’s show notes and just enjoy it.
[00:23:23] It’s just a good time. It’s a good it’s not a Christmas story, but it is a Christmas story. And it fits the the theme and like I said, horror and I love horror and it works. And honestly, I would watch this if they turned this into a movie because the author did a really good job at being very descriptive on how the zombies rip people apart and how things just transpired and went through the book.
[00:23:58] So [00:24:00] like I said, this is, um, it’s a great fun story. Um, I Am Scrooge, A Zombie Story for Christmas by Adam Roberts. Give it a shot. It’s just a fun book. I’m going to keep it on my shelf because it it’s just a fun story. Um, so yeah, thanks for joining me today on my First episode of “The In-Between” while we take a break from our regular deep dive into Throne of Glass.
[00:24:36] Our next episode, Ka-Ce will be back to join us and we’ll get back into the regular chapters of Throne of Glass. If you like what we’re doing don’t forget to follow us on social media, we’ve got Instagram, TikTok. We do have a Facebook page that we just we just started. You can also, um, email us at hello@bookscatsandchaos.Com. You can also visit us at our website, bookscatsandchaos.com, view the episodes, listen to the episodes, check us out on YouTube, give us a comment, give us a, like, give us a follow let us know if there’s other stuff that you’d like us to do, “The In-Between” on, we’re going to be picking random books.
[00:25:31] I just picked this one because it’s Christmas. And so we’re going to just be doing kind of one off here and there. Um, for the most part, these will be spoiler free, but starting in the new year, We are going to start a Patreon page that will have basically what we’re [00:26:00] doing with the other books, deep dives for these one off series.
[00:26:03] And so that will be more, instead of what I did today as a general overview of the book, I will do a deep dive into regular one off books as well. And they’ll be shorter. They’ll be like this. They’ll be about half an hour. Um, And those will definitely be spoiler episodes. So those will be put on our coming soon in the new year Patreon page, along with some other stuff that once we get it figured out, we’ll have it up there for you.
[00:26:38] And it’s not going to be, it’ll be like five bucks to get access to some of the special stuff that we’re going to put in. But, um, keep an eye out for that. And in the meantime. Give us like I said, give us a follow. Let us know if you like what we’re doing and keep on keeping on. We’ll see you guys next time.
[00:27:01] So, thanks.
[00:27:06]
