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Coming of age as a theme in literary texts
Themes of maturity in literature
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Benny Imura is the lead character of the Benny Imura otherwise known as the Rot and Ruin series of novels by Jonathan Maberry. The first novel of the series was the 2010 published title Rot & Ruin a post zombie apocalypse novel that gained critical acclaim and much commercial success.
The Benny Imura series are set several years after a zombie outbreak at a time when most of the human population was decimated. The remaining populations are living in small encampments and barely making a living from the land. The events of the novels take place in the Sierra Nevada Mountains where zombies roam the mountains killing, maiming and eating whoever they can find. Most of the settlements are fenced in to keep out the zombies which means very little contact with the outside world or other enclaves. For many of the survivors the enclave is the only thing they have left except for the younger members of the community that want more.
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In Rot & Ruin the first novel of the series, Benny Imura is a teenager who lives in a post-apocalyptic United States that is infested by zombies.
Just like every teenager in the US, Imura needs to find a job on his fifteenth birthday or get his rations halved. He is now deemed old enough to become apprentice zombie hunter to Tom his boring elder brother though if he had a choice he would never become one.
He gets into it expecting tedious days spent killing zombies for money only to find that it is vocation that teaches him the values of being human. Rot & Ruin is an evocative thriller of a novel that showcases the storytelling skills of Jonathan Maberry that won him Bram Stoker Award.
BENNY IMURA AWARDS:
The Benny Imura series of novels have won several prestigious awards over the years. Rot & Ruin the first novel of the series won a Best Novel at the 2010 Bram Stoker Award, Best Young Adult Novel at the 2011 Bram Stoker for the novel Dust and Decay and a Bram Stoker in 2012 for Flesh & bone that won the Best Young Adult Novel
Award. BENNY IMURA BOOKS INTO TV/MOVIES: The Benny Imura books are currently in development and are set to be made into a film. BEST BENNY IMURA BOOKS: Fire & Ash the last novel of the Benny Imura series is one of the best novels of the series with one of the best story lines. Benny Imura and his friends have found a Sanctuary and a jet. However they are not what the friends thought they would be. The soldiers that flew the craft are not experts but are rather bureaucrat that seem to have lost hope about the future of humanity and the Sanctuary is a hospice. With one of his best friends clinging to life Benny learns that a cure for the zombie plague may just have been discovered by an obscure scientist. The friends are now on the search for the cure but the reapers have also heard the news and are on the hunt too. But for the reapers their mission is to use the cure to rejuvenate the zombies making them into shock troops that would threaten the very existence of humanity. Dust & Decay the second novel of the series is set six months from the battle of Rot & Ruin. Nix Riley and Benny Imura had their lives change when they saw something bizarre in the air. They are now rigorously trained zombie hunters who are ready to leave the safety of the settlement to go find a better future for themselves. They are taking with them Lou Chong who is Benny’s best friend and the Lost Girl Lilah. Everything seems to be going according to plan until the well laid plans go wrong. Bits & Pieces the fifth novel of the series is another great novel that sees Benny Imura and Nix tell of their journey through Rot and Ruin where they survive all manner of hardships. It is a great novel that shows the side of the characters that have not been so evident in previous novels. OTHER BOOK SERIES YOU MAY LIKE: Many fans of the Benny Imura series of novels love the Newsflesh Trilogy by Mira Grant. The novels are post-apocalyptic zombie thrillers that incorporates horror fiction with politics, betrayal, espionage, and medical science. Fans of the Benny Imura series also like the Arisen series of novels by Glynn James. The series of novels is about Fortress Britain the last bastion of humanity left standing after the rest of the world was overtaken by a zombie apocalypse.
Rot & Ruin is a fiction novel written by Jonathan Maberry, set in the post-zombie apocalypse. The novel was released in the United States September 2010. 14 years after the zombie outbreak, this book follows Benny Imura five months after he turns fifteen as he looks for a job so that his rations won’t be cut in half. This is a third-person narrative that follows the protagonist, Benny Imura. Benny is 15 years old pale, somewhat skinny, has brown hair, and dark green eyes. Benny needs a job to live in Mountainside, a town in the Sierra Nevadas in Central California, and reluctantly joins his half-brother, Tom Imura, in the zombie-hunting business and discovers the reality of the business.
No book has captivated the zombie apocalypse better than World War Z. Max Brooks creatively presents “a worldwide zombie pandemic from outbreak to aftermath” (Boyd, Tristan). His book encompasses many social and political themes in the world today. The book reveals true fear and shows the strength of the human race.
Max Brooks is a famous author who wrote two very popular zombie books, Zombie survival guide and World War Z, which one was turned into a motion picture due to its large popularity. Colson Whitehead who wrote Zone one is a distinguished writer and has received numerous awards, one of which was New York Times best selling book of the year, given to him in 2001. These two authors give more weight towards Boschs argument as those who are zombie fans know who these writers are and read at least one of their books. Her appeal to multiple types of workers give her a wider reading base in which there are both positives and negatives to each argument given, having a good balance between the two classes. She refers to the white-collar workers as being zombie food, their skills are not needed in the zombie apocalypse.
Victor Harplin’s black and white film, White Zombie, and W.B Seabrook’s short story, “Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields”, both were produced in the early twentieth century and were among the first works to capture the nature of the zombie. The zombie being a unique monster, it originated in the folkloric and ritual practices of the New World, specifically in the Republic of Haiti (The Sub-Subaltern Monster). They both centralize around Zombies, however they do differ in the way that they are portrayed. Both were set in Haiti where the zombie originated. Also around this time the U.S. occupied Haiti and American businesses were moving to the island. America was going through serious social change in this time as well. Both women and African Americans were trying to get more rights. Women were also acting more provocative and doing things that would have been seen as inappropriate at the time. The social mold was being shattered. America was in a boom period with big business and new technological innovations. Also both the story and the film relate closely to Cohen’s first thesis. These two literary works have similarities and differences to them, however both tend to play on social and political differences of the 1920’s and 1930’s.
Max Brooks explains in his article ‘’The Movies That Rose From The Grave’’ [2006], that zombies and the supernatural forces have impacted and have become popular in the world today. The first main idea that Brooks points out is the way society has changed the meaning and glimpse for the supernatural creatures like zombies causing them to become increasingly popular. To support this zombie movies have changed from darkness and mystery to violent and bloodier scenes therefore making them more prevailing. The second main idea that is discussed by Brooks is how the media has helped to increase the popularity of zombies, vampires, ghosts. Highlighted by the author particularity both ‘’resident evil,
The bestselling children’s book The Graveyard Book was published in 2008 and is still being enjoyed by book lovers of all ages. The book is about a toddler who escapes the presence of a killer and finds refuge in a nearby graveyard. He is raised by many different characters and personalities, both living and dead in the graveyard. Unfortunately, another topic is creating a buzz about this novel other than its awards. The Graveyard Book is being called out because of its many similarities of the much older and equally popular novel The Jungle Book. The author of The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman, doesn’t deserve all of the credit for his bestselling novel because he wasn’t totally original. The Graveyard Book has many different scenes that are just like Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. Gaiman does acknowledge that he wanted to follow the same fundamentals as The Jungle Book in his Newberry Medal acceptance speech when he said, “I
... to be placed alongside Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption and Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin as one of the classic popular history book.
James Parker essay “Our Zombies, Ourselves,” informs readers that the zombie has almost outranked the vampire, and why they’re so popular. This undead monster originated from a Caribbean folk nightmare and was adapted over time by, the Halperin brothers, William Seabrook and George Romero and numerous others. Much like the vampire, zombies owe their fame to the progressiveness of technology, allowing them to consistently invade various media forms. The zombie has infested countless tv shows, movies, video games, and books, throughout the 21st century. Zombies themselves are soulless corpses who were regurgitated back into the world of the living. This making them rejects from the underworld, this presents the zombie as rejected yet inexpungable. What makes the zombie so popular, however, is that symbolizes everything that is rejected by humanity. “Much can be made of him, because he makes so little of himself. He comes back, He comes back, feebly but unstoppably” (Parker). The zombie represents humanity itself as well as what is rejected by humanity. Much like individuals today, the zombie is burdened by life’s demands, converting to nothing but a rotting, groaning human shell that stumbles through life without a purpose. The zombie is symbolizer of the real world, and all things irrepressible, whereas the vampire is a symbol of an alternate world and all things
Have you ever fell in love with a book just by reading the first few pages? I just so happened to with the book titled Wrecked by E.R. Frank. The publication date was September 27, 2005. In my opinion the book Wrecked is a very pleasant read. My opinion on this book is that it was very well written, it was easy to read, and had a terrific background story.
Although the zombie metaphor focuses primarily on fear involving unconscious contributors and their mission of adding to their population, the fear of governmental control and how society responds to the epidemic is also an issue that needs to be considered. In this scenario, the viral outbreak is not only a threat to individual health but also to the stability of society as a whole.
In Colson Whitehead 's genre novel, Zone One, society is trying to get back to its feet, to rebuild itself after a plague that lead to a zombie apocalypse took place. The post-apocalyptic society in Zone One is a reflection on how a post-capitalist version of the future might look like. The zombie apocalypse in the novel is the representation of what Marx considered, the impending revolution of the proletariat, rising against the bourgeoisie, bringing down with them the capitalist 's exploitative and oppressive socioeconomic system that has been installed for the larger part of the last 500 years. Whitehead’s portrayal of the zombie/uninfected social interaction and its power dynamics is a social critique of western capitalist society that
“Because the living dead freeze solid” (122), when word starting to get out that there were zombies, people’s first instinct was to go north. Family after family packed their belongings and ventured to campsites throughout northern Canada or wherever they felt was cold enough to escape the plague. Many people were still trying to hold on to their materialistic ways and brought “hair dryers, GameCubes, [and] laptops by the dozen” (123) with them to the campsites. These families realized very quickly that these items were not beneficial for their survival. Those that did survive the cold Canadian winters were not those who brought the most belongings, but those who had the will power to survive. As days got colder, people were forced to steal from each other, kill each other, and eventually eat each other. The only way to succeed during this brutal time was to go into this ultimate survival mode. “Eventually the sun did come out, the weather began to warm, the snow finally began to melt” and those that were left were the ones that were had the determination to survive (129).
Le Fanu uses gothic elements to intrigue and shock readers. This is clearly represented through vivid descriptions of isolated castles, abandoned churches, and mysterious woods. “… In the thick of the forest, overlooks the silent ruins of the town” (Le Faun Chapter I), “The castle is a ruin; the very village is deserted…” (Le Faun Chapter X). Le Faun uses this to create an eerie atmosphere. Through this, he manages to build suspense, forcing the readers to always be suspicious something is going to happen, but unable to determine how and when. This keeps the readers captivated. Similarly, by exploring the literature typified by ruin and mystery, Stoker explicitly exposes gothic tropes from Harker’s very first impression of the dilapidated castle. “The closed gates are of heavy old oak and iron, all eaten with rust” (Stoker Chapter II). As a result of this, Stoker is able to effectively convey the feelings of gloom, mystery and suspense. These are presented through the castle as it holds a lot of history, thus allowing Stoker to build up a haunting and ghostly atmosphere. This atmosphere is exaggerated through a sense of decaying which adds to the gothic convention in this context. “Hinges had fallen somewhat”, “wealth of dust’ and “dusty with age”, all indicating that the place is old, rusty and rather run-down (Stoker Chapter
In the article, “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism” by Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry, the authors’ evaluate the idea of the zombie and its connection to capitalism and post-humanism. According to the authors, the zombie represents much more than just a fear, it represents a loss of oneself to many different things, primarily to a capitalist society. The authors have come to the conclusion that humans have a fear of what they cannot control, and that is why the zombie is so big in entertainment. We see zombies everywhere, in movies, books, tv shows, fundraisers, marathons, and so much more. They have been around for decades, but recently they have become very popular. The authors believe this is
Throughout The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman, there are many different tactics used to show how intense and suspenseful the book really is. Neil Gaiman does an excellent job of creating a nail-biting mood during the duration of the book. Intense events and exquisite details contributed to Gaiman’s success of the doing this. The situations Nobody Owens finds himself in also helps, to make The Graveyard Book, a classic suspenseful fiction book.