Sep. 14th, 2015

My lovely and talented wife came home from San Francisco last Tuesday with a lovely parting gift--a cold. By Friday of last week I could feel myself coming down with it. Not a terrible surprise, really. You share an apartment and these things happen. So I spent the weekend getting worse, and doing as little as possible in the way of chores and resting up for a week of work.

And work today went better than expected. I thought it would be awful, and I'd be completely worn out. But not really. I'm sick, yes, but not as miserable as I feared. But given that Snippy is still sick more than a week since she came down with it, I've got a ways to go yet.

Today Twoson started feeling it coming on. Again, not a surprise. In fact, I pretty much expected he would come down with it--when you're sharing an apartment with two people who are both sick, and you're taking care of them...well.

As colds go, it's not horrible. It's a cold, which means you feel exhausted and congested and occasionally sneezy. But the worst part for me so far is that my whole torso from my waist to my chest is one big sore mass of muscles from all the coughing. And every time I cough I'm reminded of just how many muscles surround my rib cage and are involved in coughing.

On the other hand, I'm enjoying reading the Ex series by Peter Clines. He first came to my attention when Snippy told me about a couple of audio books she was really enjoyed. FOURTEEN and THE FOLD. "Horror procedurals" she called them, in that they don't seem like horror at first, just mysteries. And not particularly threatening mysteries, but the more the characters investigate, the weirder things get until the awful truth is finally revealed and you realize that, yes, it's horror. She told me something about them, and urged me to give them a try. And so I did. And they were great. I really liked them. I can't say a lot about them without spoiling them, so I won't.

Now I'm reading some of his other works. EX-HEROES, EX-PATRIOTS, EX-COMMUNICATION (which I'm currently reading), and at least two others I haven't gotten to yet. It's a series about the zombie apocalypse--with superheroes. And they've been really interesting. And like those other two books, things aren't as simple as they seem. A zombie apocalypse AND superheroes in the same story? Isn't that overkill? Or a violation of the "one fantastic element" rule or something?

I thought so. But there's more going on than you think at first, and pretty soon it's clear that this is not your garden-variety zombie apocalypse (which we've all seen so often before). With every book in the series (I'm on the third currently), it gets weirder and weirder. The zombies are the least of the protagonists' problems.

They're a threat, yes. Five million zombies (or "exes" as in ex-human, as they call them in the novels) in Los Angeles is a problem. But anyone who's seen a few zombie movies knows how to handle that. If you're smart and careful (and little bit lucky), you can survive and establish a safe place in the ruins of Los Angeles. But the zombies are only the beginning. There are worse things than zombies. Much worse--and you have to deal with those while ALSO not letting them distract you from the ever-present threat of zombies.

Like Fourteen and The Fold, these books are full of pop culture references--one character in particular is prone to quoting genre movies and tv shows, or referencing them as a way of explaining things.