Ex-Heroes

Hold on to your knickers it’s super heroes versus zombies!

Just when I thought I had read almost every kind of zombie book out there, along comes Ex-Heroes. I didn’t quite know what to expect from it, having never read anything with super heroes, but what I got was a whole FACE PUNCH full of awesome! Ex-Heroes was everything I felt a good zombie book should be, with a little added spandex and flapping capes.

The amount of detail on the gore, and suspense was perfect. It was more than sufficient to paint vivid images in your mind, maybe even give you the heebie jeebies a bit. In my case with my overly active imagination, it had me flipping on all the lights in the fucking house and tossing and turning in bed with nightmares.

On a funny show more note, It was freaking hilarious how survivors would claim bragging rights on taking out celebrity exes.

It’s two years after the first ex-human attack, and survivors are hanging on well enough in the city of Los Angeles, with a lot of help from a handful of heroes. All of the survivors and events felt so real to me. People die, that’s what happens in the apocalypse, but they also don’t forget to keep living. What hurts the most is seeing someone’s fears taken out on those that have been trying the most to protect them. It hurt my heart to read it.

So obviously, I had total nerd love for the heroes. They were strong, tragic, arrogant, beautiful, humble, self sacrificing…they just were…heroes. My heart went out to them and I rooted for them. They aren’t just super heroes, they are people with needs and emotional baggage just like everyone else. What makes them stronger than everyone else to me isn’t their super powers but their willingness to take so much on themselves to protect so many others.

Now, even though the POV jumps around a lot to all of them and even a few times to the normal people, it works really well. Each hero had a very distinctive personality that no way could you confuse one voice with another. Also, throughout Ex-Heroes the story often jumps back in time and we get to see something of that heroes past. Whether it is how they came to be a hero or their first ex encounter, I thought these flashbacks were excellently placed, well done and extremely important! So pay attention!

And remember…exes aren’t the only thing a person has to worry about after the apocalypse! – because after all even a hero can die.

Personally, I’m like an ex gnashing my teeth for another meaty Peter Clines fix! show less

One of the most solidly intriguing and creative premises I've read in a long time (seriously, I dare you to think of two common tropes less suited for each other than zombies and superheroes and make it work) with a cast of interesting characters and a truly EPIC final battle.
An overall enjoyable read, although I found the frequent jumps between past and present somewhat grating. I also found that I much preferred the first-person perspective offered in the 'then' chapters, as opposed to the more generic third person that appeared in the future. Still, it's hardly a problem for this overall gem of a novel.

Due to a laboratory accident (natch!) people start showing up with super-human powers. Soon after that zombies also appear and civilization falls. This is the story of one group of super-heroes and humans holed up in a former film studio in LA and surrounded by hordes of hungry zombies. Some of the superheroes have fallen and are now zombies with superpowers.

What did I find out about zombie novels? That page after page after page after page of killing zombies by sticking pikes through their skulls is repetitive and boring. Why didn't the superheroes use their powers more to clean up the mess? The Mighty Dragon could have incinerated them with his fiery breath. Zzzap the human star could kill them by flying through their heads, but found show more it gross and begged off, leaving his friends and all human civilization to endlessly poke pikes through skulls and be killed themselves. This is apparently much more acceptable to Zzzap.

But then we got to the scientific reasons of why this all happened. I read the virus explanations and thought to myself "OK, this guy is not a virologist". But not many people are--although surely Clines could have found an avid grad student to read what he wrote and give him some feedback. Still, I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and suspend all disbelief even if he had virus pretending to be leukocytes (sort of like grains of rice pretending to be football fields).

But then we come to the scenario with the fatal blood transfusion that started the zombie outbreak. The whole thing was stupidly impossible. RH reactions don't work that way. Hepatitis wouldn't show up for months. And Clines, instead of checking his facts, used one of the laziest, most stupid explanations I have ever come across in a published work:

" Two horrible, freak mistakes that both fell on one person. As someone in the medical profession, I know this and I understand why they could've been so baffled. Hell, anyone who watches House knows why they were baffled."

And so Mr. Clines lost me. Zombies, maybe. Zombies and superheroes--intriguing. Mindless superheroes who don't use their powers, meh. Complete lack of fact-checking. Double meh. Believing that said lack of fact-checking can be waved away with a stupid remark--3 strikes. show less

I stumbled across this book when I was cruising Amazon one day. Superheroes and zombies? How could I resist that? It was guaranteed to be awesome fun or really, really terrible. Luckily it was the former! It's pure trashy entertainment, and if that's all you are expecting from it then you won't be disappointed. I always try to rate on a scale of pure enjoyment rather than necessary "worthiness" .. and for just being a really fun read it gets 4 stars, despite its faults.

There is a quotation on the back describing it as The Walking Dead meets The Avengers, and honestly that is exactly what this book is (but so much more fun than The Walking Dead is)! There was an outbreak of a zombie plague that over ran the population, leaving on a few show more pockets of survivors.. standard zombie stuff. The zombies are actually referred to as "exes" which actually does help to make it feel a little fresher. However in this world there are also a people with super powers, who had been acting as vigilante heroes for a few years before the plague. They have banded together to help protect the survivors from whatever threats they might all face.

I honestly loved this book. It's a proper guilty pleasure. There are a good range of heroes with a range of superpowers, some more useful than others. St George is probably the most awesome as he is impervious to almost everything, super strong, he can fly and he can breathe fire! I was a big fan of Zzzap too. I thought Gorgon's powers were also interesting, and he had a nice darker edge to him next to the squeaky clean St George.

It is worth noting that this book is 100% an adolescent boy's dream. At the end of the book the authors notes that this novel was born out of conversation with friends in school, and you can tell.. and I'm not sure he ever grew up! For what it is I'm not upset with it for that. Of course it means that a lot of the women are hypersexualised.. particularly Stealth! I did like her, I thought she was an awesome character but.. there were A LOT of descriptions of how hot she is. And she wears a mask to hide her face because she is SO PRETTY that people never take get seriously. Some of this I can perhaps (perhaps) rationalise (a little bit). The majority of descriptions of her hotness comes from St George chapters (not all but most). It does serve to remind us that St George is in fact human and not boring far too perfect saintly guy. He has impure thoughts! He also has casual sex with another female character in which we get a nice description of her bra too. It's thin defence but I tried.

Now as for Stealth's costume I remained a little baffled as too why, if she was so sick of being objectified, she would choose to dress in a latex suit with belts and straps in all the right places! It was never stated anywhere, but I assume that as a "stealth" character she finds her hot body a useful distraction. She is constantly objectified.. but she isn't a sexual character. She has a bisexual past, which she mentions in a very logical and cold was (sex had as useful function) but comes across to me as a now existed as asexual. I have a feeling that might change in future books.. I was be disappointed though.

The are other women in the novel too, and while they are more sexualised than then male characters it's not to the extent of Stealth. I would say there are more descriptions of dead female exes than the male ones.. at one point he does describe the blood dripping between the breasts of one. Gross. This is problematic but.. the novel was just so much fun I honestly didn't care that much. When I was reading this, and talking about it now, it does read like a comic book. Like a graphic novel turned into text. It's an unavoidable truth that over sexualised females are a trope of comic books, so I guess it plays into the very visual style Clines is going for.

Still, Cerberus was another of my favourites, and while being a giant robotic suit of hardcore armour it is piloted by a woman. She managed to escape without any descriptions of her body parts that I can remember, and she's both super smart and completely badass. So not all hope is lost.

It's not perfect.. but I didn't expect it to be.. and I don't particularly need it to be! This is a guilty read. It's pure fun. There are a lot of action scenes are they're brilliantly written. The characters are also well-formed, and distinctive. The plot is crazy. If you like superheroes and you like zombies.. give it a read.

I loved it. Maybe I shouldn't have but I did. It's better than I ever expected it to be.. and I cannot wait to read Ex Patriots! show less

Superheroes versus zombies. That's Ex-Heroes in a nutshell. Don't like superheroes or zombies? Well...that might not be a problem, actually.

Ex-Heroes is about a group of super-powered heroes trying to protect a last enclave of humanity in a Los Angeles movie studio-turned-fortress following the zombie apocalypse. I will admit that I'm a bit of a superhero guy, but I couldn't care less about the current zombie trend. It's okay, though, because the zombie apocalypse featured in Clines' books is just the setting; the real show is the larger-than-life yet all-too-human characters: St. George, Stealth, Zzzap. Gorgon, Cerberus, Regenerator. You could draw some easy parallels between Clines' creations and the stable of popular DC and Marvel show more Comics heroes, but it doesn't matter because Clines makes his so engaging.

I loved the structure of the book, too. The chapters alternate: two "Now" chapters set in the present day, told from your standard third-person perspective; then one "Then" chapter set in the past and told in the first-person by one of the superhero characters. The Then chapters move forward chronologically, slowly building up the history of the zombie apocalypse (including an ingenious superhero-related origin for the zombies) as well as fleshing out the backstory of the characters involved. And the way they interact with the ongoing plot of the Now chapters works brilliantly.

If there are any real flaws in the book, it would be that one of the heroes seemed way too powerful, and the hasty explanations given for why he wasn't more effective didn't really satisfy me. Also, the main bad guy has huge question marks in his background that (thankfully) are mostly cleared up in the sequel, but still drove me nuts for most of this book. Those are minor nitpicks, though. This book is just too much fun. [4 out of 5 stars] show less

I received this ARC through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.

This book combines three major premises: superheroes, post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, and zombies. I love a good superhero story. Sometimes, however, it doesn't translate well to a novel. Post apocalypse stories? I love'em to bits because I'm morbid like that, but zombies tend to creep me out, so I don't actively seek out books with them. Therefore, I approached this book with some hesitance.

The book, in return, impressed me greatly.

Clines has created a vivid, incredible world here. His cast of superheroes varies widely as far as powers and personalities, and while they do follow the tropes of the genre, they are all vivid and absolutely believable. Even more impressive, show more he skips from perspective to perspective and between the past and the current apocalyptic environment, and manages to do so in a way that's not confusing at all. The heroes all speak in voices that are that distinct.

The setting itself is another wow factor. I'm a native Californian but only have a very basic understanding of where things are located around LA. Gauging from this book, Clines KNOWS this place. He uses the movie studios, the streets, and shows how it's all become a battleground. It feels firmly grounded in reality. My only wish is that the front of the book included a map.

Then there are the zombies. They are as nasty and sad as one would expect. The shambling undead have taken over the world. It's really chilling, though, when Clines breaks down the statistic to show how many zombies are staggering around LA, even after all the efforts the heroes have taken to combat them. Of course, the heroes aren't up against the zombies alone. Their big rivals in town are the Seventeen gang, and the thugs are no longer content with peddling drugs and spraying graffiti--no, they want supplies, and they want the superhero Gorgon dead.

Again, as a Californian, this really resonated with me--I could see a gang taking over in a vacuum of power like this. It's really weird to say, "This superhero zombie apocalypse novel won me over with its realism," but it's the truth. I went in with low expectations and now I really want to read the sequel that comes out soon. show less

This may be the oddest comparison, but I liked this book better than the most recent J. D. Robb novel. Usually, I can devour an Eve Dallas tale in a single sitting, with barely any breaks for real life. Well, of the two, Ex-heroes was a quicker and more enjoyable read!
I had absolutely no trouble following the timeline jumps, and found the inserted back stories very well placed and fascinating. The characters were interesting people, the bad guys excellent foils for our heroes.
I'm looking forward to reading the next book in the series, and will probably look up some of the author's earlier works next time I need a good read.