Where Indy Meets Zombies

Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead by Steve Perry
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I enjoyed maybe the last 100 pages or so--maybe less--but it's not a great book. Average? Okay. I gave it 3 stars--good enough to finish, maybe read another.

My biggest complaint as I read this was that it was very hard to imagine Indiana Jones as the person in the story. A few times in the last couple scenes, a recognizable Indy seemed to emerge, but for most of the book it felt like just some random character with his name. He was just a guy walking in the jungle without much to do. He should have been much more enterprising, more impressive, doing cooler stuff.

IMO.

Some of this works as an Indiana Jones adventure. Nicely exotic setting? Check. Some Nazis (and some Japanese soldiers, too)? Check. Some supernatural stuff going on? Check. Even a love interest. But it's thin. The whole story takes place in Haiti and a smaller island off Haiti, unlike the variety of settings you get in an Indiana Jones adventure. And the first half at least is very slow, with a long walk across an island that seems kinda pointless. You want a fast pace with lots of action, but we don't get that until the very end.

And in fact, to be fair, the very end is pretty good. There just wasn't enough story leading up to that to make this a full adventure novel. Should have been a novella. Or maybe a tight short story.

I liked bits of this, and I'm curious about all the other tie-in novels that I've never read. So I may look at some more of these. But I hope they feel more like the movies...

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