Review of “Barriers Beyond” by Tim Long

Barriers Beyond is a Kindle novella that I decided to check out once I got a kindle for Christmas because I’ve read plenty of Tim Long’s other works and have enjoyed them.  Barrier’s Beyond tells the first person perspective of one survivor during the zombie apocalypse, a former military man who shares his experiences during the first few months of survival after the dead rise.
Tim adds a nice twist to the story by giving us a new form of undead-the ghoul.  Zombies in this story are your traditional undead flesheaters, while ghouls are humans who get desperately hungry enough to eat zombie flesh to survive after things go south and food is scarce.  The taint of that flesh turns those who eat it into something along the lines of a half undead, half human creature (or at least some of them, while others go the full zombie route).  These ghouls retain some of their smarts, craft traps, and crave the flesh of humans and other ghouls.  They lead the undead in their charge on those few humans who remain.  It was a nice little addition to the zombie pantheon.
The story itself is a pretty straight forward apocalyptic thriller-Erik, the main character, reacts to the initial days of infection and prepares for the impending end of humanity by traveling up to the mountains to a friend’s log cabin to escape the assault of the undead.  While he is safe there, he finds the loneliness enough to drive him back to civilization, or what remains of it, several months later.  The story at that point goes into overdrive and the action gets amped up quite a bit until the end of the story.  Again, this is a novella, so it is a quick read and the storyline not too complicated, but it is fun if you enjoy stories about the zombie apocalypse.  The window is left open by the author for future novellas, or perhaps a tie in of this story with one of his other apocalyptic novels.

Barriers Beyond can be found on Amazon:  http://www.amazon.com/Barriers-Beyond-ebook/dp/B0042G0QZ2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1293518750&sr=1-1