After a two-hour car ride, I’m glad to say that I started listening to my audio books. I began with Mur Lafferty’s The Takeover, of which I got through seven out of the ten episodes. This audio drama is about Maureen, a woman who works at a corporate office and is offered a pretty good promotion. However, taking this promotion means working with zombies (Zombies being the better workers because they work long hours without sleep and do whatever they’re told). Maureen has to choose what is more important: being human, or the awesome benefits that come with working at Zombinc.
The humor. Lafferty incorporated a lot of simple, clean humor into the story, which made it a lot like The Office (which isn’t a bad thing). Originality. I’m not a huge zombie-buff, but out of all the zombie-related books and movies I’ve read/seen, this is the first that has made zombies an equal instead of a crazy monster. The Takeover does mention zombie slaying, but that isn’t the main focus- zombies are ABOVE the humans. Characters and dialect. Aside from the zombie aspect, all of the characters and whatnot are very believable and accurate, especially when it comes down to capturing the kinds of personalities and relationships that go down in an office environment. There’s not a single character to hate, and thank god, none of them have annoying voices. Music! Each episode has a really catchy and clever opening and closing song, both done by Andrew of Songs To Wear Pants To. Click here for the best of Songs To Wear Pants To.
Sound quality. Overall, each episode was easy to hear. Most of the characters’ dialogue was recorded very well, but for a few, there was a lot of echoing and fuzziness that really wasn’t supposed to be there. Zombie noises. I know that it’s hard to come up with the RIGHT zombie noise when nobody is really certain what a zombie would sound like. I just hope it was better than those on The Takeover. Regular zombie dialogue sounded like bad sex, and bitings sounded like someone gargling water and spaghetti. However, I do have to give kudos to the deterioration of the voices of bitten humans. Not necessarily great, but it documents the “change” well. BIGOT! Seriously, that is 50% of one character’s dialogue. Lack of bloodshed. Though I did praise The Takeover for not being the typical zombie plot…c’mon, we have to have SOME sort of zombie killing! Zombies do bite humans in the audio drama, but humans killing zombies is mentioned, not actually performed.
So there you have it. Once again, you can download The Takeover for free here. I still have to listen to three more episodes, I already recommend this to anyone.
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