Rating: 
Summary: Nice start, but unfinished.
Review: Brian Keene, The Rising (Leisure Books, 2004)
Warning: the ending of this book will hurt you.
There are a number of reviews of this book that call it the same old thing, with a couple of twists and extreme gross-out scenes. I'm not sure what book those other reviewers were reading, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't The Rising, Brian Keene's first novel.
What The Rising does is take the zombie-novel genre and turn it completely upside-down, to the point where it's pretty much a zombie novel in name only. These are zombies because they're dead and move slow, but in all other ways, they're a hybrid monster from a number of different genres. Calling them the same old zombies is rather like calling the zombies in 28 Days Later... the same old zombies. (Yes, before you say it, I KNOW the zombies in 28 Days Later... weren't actually zombies. That was why the comparison made sense.)
As for the gross-out factor... folks, Robert Deveraux did better zombie gross-out over a decade ago in Deadweight (if you consider youself a fan of extreme horror novels and haven't read Deadweight, the book that pushed the envelope back in the day and kept it pushed to the edge for years, you don't know what you're missing. Though come to think of it, Bob's zombie wasn't really a zombie, either). The death, mutilation, et al. in The Rising is pretty run-of-the-mill stuff these days. After you've finished Robert Devereaux, turn your attention to Edward Lee, Charlee Jacob, and the rest of that pack. Then come back and give this one another read. The Rising's squish factor is actually pretty low.
What The Rising is, ultimately, is readable. It's simple genre fiction, though as I said above it's difficult to put it into any subgenre-pigeonhole of horror. The dead are rising and eating people, but they're not your typical zombies. Bands of survivors are fighting the zombies and fighting each other. The main protagonist of the novel is Jim, a construction worker from West Virginia who's trying to reach his son in New Jersey, but the novel is far more an ensemble-cast affair than a novel that focuses on Jim.
And this (aside from the typos, which we'll note here, sneer at, and then ignore) is the book's main failing. Keene tries to do way too much with this novel in the very small space he allots for it; The Rising, at three hundred twenty-one pages, is the shortest book I've ever read from Leisure's horror line. (Even William Schoell, back in the days when Leisure were a fledgling press, wrote monstrous novels, and when he wrote the slimmer books, published them through St. Martin's.) It should have easily been twice, maybe three times, its present length. Every character in the book could have used a good fleshing-out, no pun intended, especially the main characters and the main villain. Also, a number of scenes cut far too randomly, as if large chunks had been taken out and re-edited back in in greatly abbreviated form later (this happens most often with Frankie, one of the major characters in the novel). This could have been a stylistic decision on Keene's part, but honestly, given the inconsistency in structure, it looks more like a decision made by someone at Leisure to whom Keene was beholden. To Keene's credit, he did manage to keep the style consistent in those passages. Still, there are far too many jarring moments and far too many cardboard characters.
The book's strongest and weakest, simultaneously, point is its ending. The reader is likely to turn the last page and wonder where page three hundred twenty-two went. The answer to that question ultimately determines my rating of the book. If it was meant in the way I think it was, it raises the book's rating a full star. If it was meant to set up sequel, I'll be coming back, taking that star away, and revising it down another half-star for catering so nakedly to the Hollywood machine (this book, visual as it is, does scream "make me into a movie" more than once). It moves exceptionally quickly, and as I said, its main problem is that there isn't more of it. Rather than a sequel, I hope we get an unrated director's cut, because what's here looks like the skeleton, with a few bits of decaying flesh attached, of a horror classic. *** ½
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