The Purge of Babylon: A Novel of Survival: Purge of Babylon, Volume 1

Post Apocalyptic with real dialogue that’s sometimes very funny!They have a real Kate…. Wasn’t sure about it after the brothers get it but a good read can’t wait for the entirety of this series!

Action filled, scary apocalyptic story of man versus creatures. Excellent read and I look forward to reading book 2. Highly recommend.

Just a great read.This one starts with the Harris County Sheriffs Department SWAT team, Houston, Texas.The team is in the condemned Wilshire Apartments getting ready to make a night raid on suspected drug dealers on the 20th floor.Will and Danny are deputies and are members of the SWAT team. They are also both ex Army Rangers who survived multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan.Will and Danny are also best friends. Friends who have been through much in both war and peace. Friends who will always have each others backs.Danny and Will are good together in a firefight. They move without even talking. At times without even looking at one another. They just KNOW what they are supposed to do and what the other will be doing in turn. Its a trait thats saved Will, Danny and the rest of the SWAT team on more than one occassion. Its also a trait that most can't fathom or copy. Ranger training at its best.Danny is a jokester and very likable. Although he's Texas born and bred he looks like a blonde California surfer dude. He tells jokes, good and bad, to anyone who will listen. Underneath the jokester and surfer facade is one highly intelligent Danny. He's also one very capable ex Ranger.Will is a native Texan as well but he's a quiet kinda guy. Will actually majored in Greek History before he joined the Army right out of college and became a Ranger. Will is another extremely intelligent guy. He's also one very capable ex Ranger and both he and Danny ain't hard to look at either.Will's a planner and a thinker. He's always thinking ahead and trying to figure things out. In Wills mind knowledge is power and knowing your enemy gives you power. Its a trait thats served he and Danny well both in Afghanistan and SWAT.According to a laughing Danny it could take Will three or four hours to pick up a girl at a bar.A very serious Danny will also tell you if you're on a mountain in Afghanistan surrounded by Taliban and need a way out then Will's the guy who will come up with the plan to get you out. Will is a brilliant tactician and a guy you want on your side when the going gets tough.When Marker, head of the SWAT team, gives the word to bust the door down the raid goes straight into the S**tter. There isn't a druggie or drug dealer in sight. There are, however, "things."These "things" look almost frail. Skin hung on bones. Their skin is black, they are hairless and their eyes are black as tar. They aren't strong but they are oh so fast and there appear to be hundreds of them. They waste no time in attacking the SWAT team and Marker is the first victim.These "things" which Will and Danny come to call ghouls are impervious to bullets.Will, Danny and the rest of the SWAT team shot them to peices. Hell, they blew half the heads off some of them and the "things" still got up and keep coming.Danny, Will and Peeks their wounded SWAT brother fight their way down to the tenth floor. Backup never showed and Danny, Will and Peeks are on their own.On the tenth floor they find a door with a lock that works. It's not much of a door but its one they can defend.On searching the apartment Will finda a couple of silver crosses that he thinks will make good weapons. If nothing else they can bash the heads in as the crosses are heavy.So begins one damned fine read.This one has Will, Danny, Kate, Luke, Carly, Vera, Ted, the SWAT house, C-4, black eyed ghouls, blue eyed ghouls, death, explosions, a bunker Will knows about, a girl named Lara, the Sundays, silver, the sun, an enemy that took the country in one night and Will and Danny and the other survivors in a fight for their lives.Five Stars and them some.

Am giving this 5 stars because I after my initial thought of "oh no it's another zombie movie" I was hooked.It's not just a zombie story. I found the zombie/vampire/hive mind mixture to be interesting and different (not that zombie apocalypse stories are a normal read for me).I couldn't put it down and had to read as many of the books in the series (and the companions) that are available, the author really nailed the tension and suspense.I thoroughly recommend this book and the rest of the series.However.........When I finished reading the books I went and read the reviews, particularly the lowers scores and I have to say I agree with most of them: - The editing was a bit patchy, especially in the first book (wrong word usage being the most obvious). - Dialogue was stilted and while I enjoyed the witty banter between the two main characters it seemed like they couldn't actually converse any other way. It needed some actual meaningful conversation to round it out. - All the characters were flat, undeveloped and unemotional, I developed no real attachment to them at all. The constant demise of the "red shirts" got a bit irritating. - Some of the lower reviews complained about the female characters being sex objects and were just there for inappropriately timed sex scenes. I think (for me at least) it is because they were so undeveloped. If those female characters were a bit more rounded out it would have made the world of difference.Possible spoilers here.By far my biggest annoyance with the first book is the "missed opportunities". By this I mean bits of the story that would have been great to have expanded, and the glaringly obvious stupidity or what I call "hello!?" scenes.The three top offenders are:3. Laras hand ......what was the point?? This didn't go anywhere meaningful at all. Why didn't they perform tests on it to see of they could find anything that would kill it? You know, explore what they already knows about the Ghouls and find out what else might work.2. Laras epiphany that the Ghoul infection rewrites DNA - Hello!? Is this not obvious? The Ghouls bite a human and they drastically change into something else. Aside from that, who cares? It didn't add anything to the story and that is all she got from studying the hand.1. My all time top peeve though is this ....... The ghouls are killed by sunlight, yet nobody thought "hey we have UV lights to grow plants inside, maybe they will affect the Ghouls as well". It's not rocket science, most people know how growing plants indoors works, and it wouldn't take a genius to at least ask the question. I would have expected the people already in the bunker to have explored this angle and then been able to have something to add to the story line.I kept expecting that once they did figure it out, someone would think to raid a horticultural supply store for UV lights, instead of concentrating on guns and junk food when looking for supplies. But they didn't, not in any of the books.All that aside, I am champing at the bit for the next book to be finished and available. What the books may lack in some areas they make up in spades with tension and suspense.

I have read a lot of EOTW / apocalyptic novels in recent years and I have gone right off standard zombie stories. However, this is not a standard zombie story. No the creatures in this are something more akin to vampires (dusk till dawn type not Christopher Lee type). Yet, different still.The story follows a handful of survivors who by sheer luck manage to stay alive until daylight, the morning after the end of the world.As is typical of most American EOTW novels, our main heroes are ex-special forces types (Rangers-turned-SWAT in this case), who come armed to the teeth, as cool as cucumbers and with a good disposition toward the weak and helpless - especially if they were gorgeous girls (no American EOTW novel I have read has our heroes towing pug-ugly porkers around - they probably are the first to die I suppose).Also typically there are crazed gangs of bandits, more guns than the British armed forces own and plenty of MREs around.Untypically, there are twists aplenty. Our heroes also have a sense of humour that people who do dangerous jobs do seem to often have but is rarely seen in these novels.Also untypically of Kindle books, this is well edited.Buy this book. Its a page turner.At 02:30 this morning, I finished this one, went on-line, bought the next one and read the first chapter of that.....

I didn't have high expectation of this novel, I thought it would just be a way to pass the time, how wrong I was. This is a fast paced, action packed novel which still manages to draw its characters in quite fine detail. The apocalypse caused by a zombie plague is quite a common scenario in novels and on TV these days but this novel puts a different spin on things. I don't want to spoil it for potential new readers, all I can say is that I bought this about three weeks ago and I'm already on the fourth book in the series. Many horror stories these days seem to be written with the focus on the horror to the detriment of character development (or they depict stereotypical cardboard cutout people, particularly when it comes to women), failing to realise that horror is only really effective when you care about the people involved. I found myself anxious and desperate to get back to reading on the occasions when I had to put the book down (yes, it's one of those books that makes you resent the intrusion of real life sometimes!) and my favourite characters were in peril. If you're a horror fan you should definitely try this book, even if you're not, you will still find much to enjoy in it.

As an avid reader of apocolyptic style books and always after something new and was getting more and more bored with what seemed like authors going round in circles and re-writing what's already been written. However I was happy to start reading The Purge of Babylon and be back "in the zone" of not wanting to put this one down. The author asks for feedback on the last page of the book so I will attempt to be as helpful as possible.This story has a slight twinge of The Twelve by Justin Cronin but I will say now it's a much easier read. And shorter. Perhaps a little simpler in its language which proved frustrating at times when you want something a meaty. And there are only so many times you need to read that the creatures have no "sex organs" to know what we were dealing with here. Perhaps a differing description to convey androgeny would suffice without going back to these same two words as it gets a little repetitive ( and in other areas ) which frustrates the reader.The main characters are likable and the banter that is converyed sometimes feels unneccesssary but then when you think about situations like this and the characters the author is attempting to put forward you truly believe these little conversations could actually take place. It makes them seem very real. The love interest is what annoyed me until I saw what happened at the end. Would Kate have ended up that way if Will tried a little harder with her? Or if anyone did? In a more personal aspect it make you wonder what kind of person you would end up as if push came to shove in times of tribulation?Some areas were predictable but some were a shock to the system. I was definately annoyed when my train came to it's stop and have had people come close to being run over as I couldn't put my kindle down while walking through the tube stations. I am looking forward to his next novel because right now I am wondering how on earth this all started, what the main surviving characters are going to do to get out of the predicament this book left them in at the end and how it will culminate.Cracking book, brilliant story line and looking forward to the next installment apparently out in Spring 2014.

Just finished this book. A real page turner and couldn't wait to see what happened next. I've already bought the next two books in the series. My only gripe is a couple of niggling details. At one point, one of the characters fills up his motorbike with fuel from a truck - no motorbike would run on diesel fuel. Second point, we hear about the ghouls getting shot many times and even having half their head blown away, but still not dying (I'm sure I also read that even decapitation doesn't kill them), yet in the fight in the underground bunker a poke with a knife is all it takes to kill them.Aside from these minor technicalities, I really loves this book and am getting stick into the next one now.And don't buy the audio book, it's a real disappointment. The reader seems to have no interest in the book at all. It's like he's reading the instructions for a washing machine.

This, I think, is my first review for a book, but I had to leave one after finishing all the books in this series.I won't go into what the books are all about as this has been covered by everyone else, nor will I comment on those that have left one star reviews (!!!)I read lots of books, my wife reads more than they seem to be able to publish in a day, and my eldest son reads almost nothing if he can help it but is a bit of a survival nut.I read the first one and was hooked immediately. Characters are great, the monsters are great, situations seem repetative but at the same time get you hooked each time. I think Sisavath's writing skills are very cinematic, and I am almost able to cast all the players as I reads the books.I have now been through all the books, my wife read them one after the other and my eldest son is plowing through them one after the other.We are now desperate to find out how the series ends.Would recommend anyone these books, have been added to the list of my favourite series of books.