Zombies and Shit is a Zombie Apocalypse Survival Horror-Bizarro Fiction novel by Carlton Mellick III.
Twenty people wake to find themselves in a boarded-up building in the middle of the zombie wasteland. They soon discover they have been chosen as contestants on a popular reality show called Zombie Survival. Each contestant is given a backpack of supplies and a unique weapon. Their goal: be the first to make it through the zombie-plagued city to the pick-up zone alive. But because there's only one seat available on the helicopter, the contestants not only have to fight against the hordes of the living dead, they must also fight each other.
A campy, trashy, punk rock gore fest that is as funny as it is brutal, as sad as it is strange. An edge-of-your-seat thrill ride that twists the zombie genre into something you've never seen before, but always wanted to.
This work provides examples of:
- Action Girl: Junko and Rainbow Cat are both extremely capable fighters, far more so than most of the male contestants. Xiu is even better. And then there's Nemesis...
- All for Nothing: Vine gives this lament when Wayne blows up the helicopter with Junko on it - and more importantly for Vine, the art work that he and the other merc punks were there to retrieve and have now given their lives for.
- A World Half Full: Wayne has the zombie-killing device snuck on set within a lawn gnome meant as a zombie-repellant weapon where Scavy and Mr. T plan on amplifying the device's signal, ending the zombie menace once and for all and bringing down the corrupt regime of the Platinum Quadrant in the process.
- The Apunkalypse: The Merc Punks are a roaming tribe of people that adapted to live outside of the human settlements.
- Black Comedy Rape: Sort of. At one point Bosco, who is indifferent to sex but has an obsessive (even predatory) desire for closeness, forcibly hugs and presses himself against Rainbow Cat. She realises to her disgust that he's "snuggle-raping her."
- Chainsaw Good: Junko uses a wrist-mounted one, to great effect.
- Cool Old Guy: Lee is a veteran soldier, and entirely unbothered by his predicament since he doesn't care about surviving anyway. All he wants to do is get drunk on some genuinely good booze for once and then die boringly so as to deny those bastards watching their entertainment.
- Cool Versus Awesome: In one corner, the head of Mr. T on a superpowerful, Nigh-Invulnerable robot body. In the other, a genetically engineered Super-Soldier snake girl with a Healing Factor. Enough said.
- Crapsack World: Most of the world has been brought down by a plague of highly infectious and nigh-unkillable zombies. In one of few remaining settlements is separated into different Quadrants. Drugs, rape, gang violence, human trafficking, child prostitution and virtually every urban horror you could imagine is present in the Copper Quadrant, with those in the Gold and Platinum Quadrants exploiting them for cheap and dangerous labor until they were drugged and dragged of to be killed in the twisted reality show Zombie Survival for their entertainment.
- Decoy Protagonist: Charlie is the first point of view character and we learn a lot about him and his life early on. He lasts all of three chapters, and is only the second character to die.
- De Terminator: Scavy refuses to back down in the face of impossible odds, and tends to somehow make it through them no matter how unlikely it seems. Indeed, he is one of only two main characters who make it through the novel alive!
- Fan Disservice: Gogo is made of this. If there was a Miss FanDisservice trope, she'd be the only entry.
- Fat Bastard: Alonzo is very heavy, and definitely a bastard. The same day that he got kidnapped for the game, he'd slit the throat of his nephew since the young man refused to aid him in a criminal enterprise.
- The Fundamentalist: Wendy is a sweet-natured example. Wendy's mom, who's spent her whole life telling her that the reason why she constantly gets abused and victimised is that she doesn't have enough faith in the Lord, is a considerably more straight one.
- Gold Makes Everything Shiny: Mr. T has a robot body built from his own melted down gold.
- The Hedonist: Gogo likes eating, having sex and doing drugs - all the time, and in every conceivable variation.
- Hive Mind: Trios of punk mercs are conditioned to think of themselves as a single individual. Two members are Arms, who exist solely to obey the third member, who is the Head. Notable in that while they can't actually read each other's minds, after years of a trio serving and training together the Arms will eventually get so good at anticipating the Head's orders that all three of them feel like they can.
- Immoral Reality Show: Zombie Survival is a reality show for the elite where random people from the poor Copper Quadrant are drugged and transported to a warehouse in the Red Zone. They are each given a random weapon and are then told to got to a landing site. They'll have to make it through zombie-infested wastelands until they can make it to the landing site where a rescue helicopter and the grand prize are waiting for them, and both are only aroud for one survivor.
- Innocent Fanservice Girl: Nemesis doesn't seem to see the point of clothes.
- Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Wayne Rizla has an affair with another woman (having only married for his wife's wealth), and when she comes to him revealing that she was pregnant, he uses his influence to have her moved to the slums of the Copper Quadrant. After his wife dies, he becomes curious of what became of his unborn child and finds out that she has been orphaned and is now the underaged prostitute Ariana. When he goes in person to tell her that she is his daughter and that he wants to take her back with him to the Platinum Quadrant. The jaded Ariana thinks this is just some kind of role-play and proceeds to suck him off. He does nothing to stop her and ends up becoming a repeat customer to her. The thought of having sex with his own daughter without her even knowing the truth turned him on, and having his own daughter torn apart by zombies on live television didn't kill this arousal one bit.
- Law of Inverse Fertility: Xiu and Vine really wanted kids, having dreamed of it since they were kids themselves. When it turned out that Xiu couldn't have them, they were distraught enough to volunteer for a suicide mission. note
- Mad Artist: Gunther von Hagens (yes, that Gunther von Hagens
) was a controversial anatomist who perfected plastination who, after seeing his creations come to life and killing people on Z-Day, locked himself within the museum and went insane. With the living dead roaming everywhere and nothing but free time on his hands, he began crafting more artwork out of the zombies around him before he was found by a band of soldiers and brought back to Neo New York where he started a family. - Mad Scientist: Oro is a talented chemist and engineer, entirely amoral, and very proud of his self-proclaimed genius and superiority over all lesser intellects. He's implied to have invented, among other bizarre things, a perpetual motion machine.
- Meet My Good Friends Lefty and Righty: Mr. T calls his fists "Brick" and "Mortar." Much to his annoyance, another character points out the
Fridge Logic that since his hands are made of steel, they're actually harder than brick or mortar. - Metaphorgotten: Even Mr. T himself admits that his Breaking Speech to a drug lord got away from him a little.Mr. T: You better listen to the T-2000. Crime doesn't pay. And even if it does pay, there's taxes on that pay. And the T-2000 is the tax man, come to collect. And he makes sure you pay your taxes in full, on time. And you can't write off nothing, not even the company car.Tim Lion: What the fuck are you talking about?
- Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot:
- Three words; zombie fucking elephants!
- The mechjaws are zombie cyborg attack dogs.
- Our Zombies Are Different: Undead with a particular hunger for brains. Destruction of the brain (or anything really) are completely ineffective, they start off intelligent but slowly degrade before they. Mindlessly hunt shouting "brains!". Extra points for adding Zombie Puke Attack that eats away at people's flesh and infects them on contact.
- Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Subverted with Nemesis. She seems like a creepy Emotionless Girl who'd kill you as soon as look at you, but Haroon finds out that she's in fact perfectly nice once you get to know her, and that she is capable of happiness and has a need for closeness even if she expresses both a bit oddly. Double subverted when she ends up killing him because she's had all her memories of him wiped.
- Shout-Out: Mr. T's robot body is the T-2000. The previous model was the T-1000.
- Stalker with a Crush: Bosco is this for Rainbow Cat since she's the only woman who ever slept with him without being paid. Subverted in that he's so pathetic that far from living in fear of him, she can't even remember who he is.
- Super-Soldier: Nemesis is genetically engineered to be the perfect zombie-killing machine.
- Third-Person Person: Mr. T wants you to know that he is one, fool!
- Those Wacky Nazis: Heinz is a proud member of the mostly-unsuccessful Fifth Reich.
- Undying Loyalty: Scavy's main saving grace is that he has this for anyone he regards as his True Companions, which is the other punks at the start and in the flashbacks and the group of contestants he joins in the story proper. He'll do absolutely anything for them, even when it seems downright suicidal.
- Verbal Tic: Scavy has one and shit.
