I found my way back to reading..

It had been a long time since i had read a book. Now I'm not talking, i dont know how, or i havent read anything during this break from reading, just no real books, plenty of magazines, and all kinds of chats online, and BBQ information and cooking how-to's uncountable. I mean i havent sat down and read a book since high school. Probably back in 2001 or so i finished reading Battlefield Earth, and that is the last book i was interested in... i picked up a few here and there read a few chapters or halfway through.. and then set em aside, for more important things, like Cars.

That all changed last week when the dreaded (to everyone else it seems) Facebook stepped in and steered me in a different direction. One of my new fave restaurants Pizzeria Mimosa had popped something up about an author dropping  an autographed book or something of the like... and my interest was piqued.

I have become a huge supporter of the local. Local produce, local art, local food (restaurants) and the like. So when i heard read that he was a local author, i googled him. When i found out he was a Bram Stoker award winner many times over, i got real interested! A local guy that is actually good, not the typical type cheesy western  cowboy type writing i have been around my whole life. Thank goodness he broke the local mold.

Enter Blood Ocean the book that got me back into books. From the google search i turned up a preview that gave me the first few chapters free to read, and left me wanting. Blood Ocean is part of The Afterblight Chronicles which (i havent read any of the others yet) are a collection of graphic novels with different authors under Abaddon Books. The basic gist of the apocalyptic series is that a plague (no not the zombie plague) wiped out folks  without type O-neg blood. (im O-pos dead i'd be) The chaos that ensues over the next few decades is what these books are about.

Blood Ocean            Abaddon Books

Blood Ocean is written fantastically and imaginatively by Weston Ochese (sounds like oaks). Check his own website to learn more about him. WWW.WESTONOCHSE.COM.

Blood Ocean is set on a floating island of a thousand moored together ships around a central Freedom Ship. With the mishmash of Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Mexican, Hawaiian, North American and Korean cultures, each has their responsibilities to survive, and have even set themselves  apart with their   very own tasks that they have come to be known for. The Water Dogs control the water, what is below the ships is theirs, no questions, and the Pali Boys own the skys swinging from ship to ship between masts, and nets set up to catch birds. Los Tiburones are the drug dealers of the ship, seems with an apocalypse, bad habits dont die people need their fix. There are many more interlocked characters but non more critical than the Corpers and the Boxers that do their bidding. Corpers are Japanese scientist types trying to find a cure for the Minimata disease that plagues the floating city, and the Boxers get the subjects for the Corpers to do the testing on, wether they like it or not...are they testing for the good of the people... or something much worse??

In the book we follow Kavika, a Pali Boy through an extreme learning curve to a harsh reality that is life. Things that he'd known to be true will be shattered, replaced with a much more grim existence. Like finding the truth to the horrible experiments that some of the people of the city suffered. You will follow him in a very fast transition from a boy to a man, as he will test himself, and his friends to their limits, finding out where that line that cannot be crossed lies, and feeling the emptiness that death brings to a person's soul. There are the good guys and bad guys like every story must have, but there are so many more in Blood Ocean. Relationships that are far more complex than first meet the eye, intertwined in an almost confusing at times, but in the end it crashes together in an explosion that makes sense.

Blood Ocean is an incredible, and fast paced imaginative story, that will keep you reading long past your bedtime.

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