“You're in the army now, son...”
Peter Clines' first zombies v. superheroes book, Ex-Heroes, performed a merry foxtrot around the conventions of both genres and managed to come up with something if not exactly new then at least shown from a perspective that felt fresher than it should given how virtually everything in both camps is a cliche these days. Ex-Patriots builds on that in a way that also works in spite of the hoary inevitability of its structure, and even finds some new ideas to subtly work in along the way.
The arrival of the military is, of course, a recipe for further conflict, and the steady development of this thread throws up very little in the way of surprises...until about two-thirds in when suddenly the expectations you have get thrown off the reservation and you find yourself in a book subtly different to the one you were reading 10 pages earlier. The imaginative leaps that Clines makes - see The Driver, for one - shouldn't work but really do, and he dangles enough barminess to get away with it more often than not. Don't take this too seriosuly and you're in for a blast; the world is expanded convincingly and with a surprising amount of care, and obviously some Big Things are set up for future books. Bring it on.
Flaws present themselves in the fact that just about every single human character might as well be called Tom - don't worry about separating them out, if they're not superpowered they're not really relevant to the lot - and there's perhaps a lack of scope in the overall arc of this particular story. I'm going to give Clines some slack on this second point, however, because this feels like he's gathering himself together to go even crazier in the next book, and anyone who entwines these two concpets this successfully deserves your patience.
Paperback edition
This reviewer received a free of charge product for review.
