Enter the Zombie by David Lubar – review

Feed your need, all of you zombies out there! Feast on the conclusion of David Lubar’s famous, always humorous, but sometimes gross series Nathan Abercrombie: Accidental Zombie with the coolest book of the series yet, Enter the Zombie! Why is it the coolest? Because it’s got action, adventure, Nathan and his friends Abigail and Mookie forming a team to enter a competition, the search for a cure to Nathan’s slight zombie problem, further gross-out behaviors like removing heads and bowling with them, and because it’s the final book in the series! Yeah, the last reason is sad, but I personally doubt that it’s the last we’ll read about Nathan’s adventures in spying and taking down evil wherever it may be found, so it’s all good!

“Winter is over. I used to like Spring. But when you’re dead, and trying not to rot too fast, the last thing you look forward to is warm air and sunshine.”

That is one of my favorite quotes from Enter the Zombie. Nathan has helped his sarcastic mentor and boss of the spy organization known as BUM (the Bureau of Useful Misadventures), Mr. Murphy, in the previous four novels of the series, and he does again in this one, to try and take down RABID, or Raise Anarchy by Inciting Disorder. But he also has very real problems of his own to deal with, like keeping it all together, quite literally speaking. He’s falling apart; his bones are fragile and sometimes break off. He has to resort to gluing the parts that fall or break off back onto his body. He and his friends want to find a cure for his state of being a zombie before it’s too late, and he crumbles into dust.

There’s a lot that I liked about Enter the Zombie, starting right off the bat with its title. That’s because, if you didn’t already know, it’s a humorous take on the title of a Bruce Lee movie, Enter the Dragon. And, if you don’t know who Bruce Lee was, he was only one of the baddest (meaning greatest) martial artists ever to be in the movies, that’s who! He was the inspiration for others that followed, like Jackie Chan and Jet Li.

Mr. Murphy wants Nathan and his friends to enter into the Brainy Brawny contest that has an unusually high percentage of kids who do well in it get recruited for the RABID organization. If Nathan gets recruited into it, Mr. Murphy hopes that will help bring RABID down. The competition is called “Brainy Brawny” because it’s designed to test both academic skills and physical fitness. Before the team can advance to higher levels, they first have to beat another team within their own school, composed of Nathan’s nemesis Rodney and his pals. And the only way for them to have much of a chance at all is for Nathan to somehow get stronger bones–anyone Got Milk?

Some of the schools that Nathan’s team competes against in the Brainy Brawny tournament have names that come directly from horror novels, like Harker Elementary, Dunwich Academy, and Lovecraft Upper Elementary. Harker is taken from the famous novel by Bram Stoker, Dracula. Harker was the last name of a lawyer Count Dracula hired. H.P. Lovecraft was a writer of horror novels and short stories, one of his most well-known being the Dunwich Horror, which was also made into a movie with the same title. You can get some idea of the author’s sort of strange but cool sense of humor by the names he chose for these schools.

And, guess what? David Lubar even gives a shout out in his Acknowledgment pages at the end of his book to one of the editors and owners of this web site, Damon Caporaso. You might know him better as Damon Cap, and you might recognize his avatar at the top of this page and next to comments he makes here, of an elf with a blue cap on his head.

Enter the Zombie is another funny, page-turning Nathan Abercrombie novel that you won’t want to miss! I’d highly recommend it to anyone who is already a fan of the series, or anyone who likes to read books involving gross-out humor, spy adventures, and zombies. You don’t have to have read any of the previous books in the series to thoroughly enjoy Enter the Zombie. If you try this book and enjoy it, then I would also recommend that you read Lubar’s other excellent books, like Hidden Talents, True Talents, and his Weenie novels, In the Land of the Weenies, Invasion of the Weenies, The Curse of the Campfire Weenies, The Battle of the Red Hot Pepper Weenies, and his forthcoming book (due out this May), Attack of the Vampire Weenies. They’re all excellent books–if you haven’t read them yet, check ’em out at your earliest possible convenience (or even sooner)–you’ll be glad you did!