The reason I purchased a copy of Mark Allan Gunnells’ Fort is, simply, because I’ve often imaged what it would be like to be trapped inside or to fortify a dormitory or an apartment building during the early stages of the zombie apocalypse. The advantages to the multi-living unit as a safe house are obvious: multiple floors to hide in, all doors have locks, safety in numbers, all the necessities of home, etc. Turn off the elevators, barricade the doors to the stairwells leading to the second floor and you’re safe as can be; the only problem beings – how can you escape if the dead get in and how do you get supplies and food once you’ve locked yourself inside? All of these questions are basically addressed in Fort. I’m glad that someone else has had these ideas at some point, too.
Fort centers around the zombie apocalypse as it kickstarts and overtakes a college campus on the East Coast of America. Pockets of survivors have hulled up in certain areas of dormitory row as the “dead-heads” roam the campus, often smelling the youths and repeatedly trying to get through the front doors. It has been confirmed that the military is on the way, eradicating the walking dead as they move south. The only problem with this is – the college kids have already been trapped for about two months and are running out of food… and the military is at least another two months away. It seems like a death sentence either way, stay inside the safety of the dorm common rooms and starve to death, or make a break to other buildings on campus to scavenge for food and risk getting eaten alive. The choice is theirs to make.
Fort is told interchangeably through two interconnecting stories – the present time in which all the action is taking place, and the days or weeks before the zombies reanimated. The latter of the two story-lines is where all of the character building comes into play. We learn about who all of the students were before the world ended, what their hopes and dreams were, what dirty little secrets they were hiding. Some characters are, obviously, more likable than others. Some you like from the very beginning and others deteriorate morally as the story progresses. I found myself more interested in the backstories of the students than the horrors they were facing in real time. I almost wish that Mark Allan Gunnells had figured out a way to flesh them out a day or two before the zombie attack happened, gradually taking us through their daily lives as impressionable college students, to the uncertainty of what’s going on around them, and finally the world crumbling and being infested with zombies. It would have been a much smoother transition and something I would have appreciated more as a reader than jumping back and forth in time.
Zombies have been around for a long time. They were given a premature birth in the 1930’s before George A. Romero gave them a proper incarnation in Night of the Living Dead (1968). Most recently, however, the genre has been redefined again by AMC’s “The Walking Dead” and at this point we’re struggling to see anything new or original. I wouldn’t say that Fort is anything genre defining – not even close – but it does a good job at taking old school zombie elements and current mainstream interpretations and forming them into a cohesive story about the zombie apocalypse as it stands in 2015. Fort does a great job at hitting readers in the right emotional spots, whether it be anger, surprise, sadness or even in the romance department. Villains are introduced, heroes fall… A lot happens all at once, making Fort a quick read for anyone who enjoys an emotional, action-packed zombie survival story. However, this is also part of the problem.
Fort is published by Sinister Grin Press and is listed as being 164 pages long. Fort only has a prologue, seven chapters, and an epilogue; though it seems a lot shorter. I can read a good book in three or four days; more if I chose to skip it a few times in hopes of extending the journey I’ve immersed myself in. Last night around 1am I downloaded this novel to my Kindle, read it for about an hour and a half, picked it up again this morning and was done in another hour and a half. How is this possible? I can only imagine that the font is larger than average, spacing out the pages much more to give it a larger page count because this seems more like a novella to me than a full fledged novel – bigger than a short story but not big enough to constitute the title of a novel. Everything happened so quick, I started to get invested, and then it’s over because it’s so short. I was left wanting more. A LOT more. Gunnells has dozens of stories under his belt, all available online and I’m hoping… HOPING… that he picks up the Fort story again and gives it a longer sequel.
Points deducted for pace and length… but overall… Final Score: 7.5 out of 10.
