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    Positive: A Novel
    Positive: A Novel
    Positive: A Novel
    Audiobook15 hours

    Positive: A Novel

    Written by David Wellington

    Narrated by Nick Podehl

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    In the bestselling vein of Guillermo Del Toro and Justin Cronin, the acclaimed author of Chimera and The Hydra Protocol delivers his spectacular breakout novel—an entertaining page-turning zombie epic that is sure to become a classic.

    Anyone can be positive . . .

    The tattooed plus sign on Finnegan's hand marks him as a Positive. At any time, the zombie virus could explode in his body, turning him from a rational human into a ravenous monster. His only chance of a normal life is to survive the last two years of the potential incubation period. If he reaches his twenty-first birthday without an incident, he'll be cleared.

    Until then, Finn must go to a special facility for positives, segregated from society to keep the healthy population safe. But when the military caravan transporting him is attacked, Finn becomes separated. To make it to safety, he must embark on a perilous cross-country journey across an America transformed—a dark and dangerous land populated with heroes, villains, madmen, and hordes of zombies. And though the zombies are everywhere, Finn discovers that the real danger may be his fellow humans.

    Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome meets World War Z and I Am Legend in this thrilling tale that has it all: a compelling story, great characters, and explosive action, making Positive the ultimate zombie novel of our time.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateApr 21, 2015
    ISBN9780062394804
    Author

    David Wellington

    David Wellington lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of the Monster Island trilogy of zombie novels; the Thirteen Bullets vampire series; the epic post-apocalyptic novel Positive; and the Jim Chapel missions, including the digital shorts “Minotaur” and “Myrmidon,” and the novels Chimera and The Hydra Protocol.

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    Reviews for Positive

    4/5

    139 ratings14 reviews

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Incredible tension and turns in story.
      Definitely worth to listen to it!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Seamed a bit slow at the start but got better as it continued.
    • 5/5
      One of the better post appolocyptic books I've read. Just enough adventure and enough character building and human struggles.
    • 5/5
      Very good book kept my interest the whole time I didn't want to stop listening.
    • 5/5
      Excellent!! Fast passed. Characters written very well!. I started to care for them immediately! Excellent novel!
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this. Nice take on the zombie genre. Which is one of my fave. It’s more about human conflict. Mad Max that happens to have some zombies too. Narrator is fantastic. I would read a sequel if that tells you anything.
    • 5/5
      Really enjoyed this book. Narrator matched the character well. Good action and storyline always changing keeping you engaged.
    • 5/5
      awesome great to read it give it a read okay
    • 5/5
      I enjoyed this book. There were some uncomfortable moments but the book was more about the people and less about zombies and I thought the character development was smart and endearing.
    • 3/5
      It was a bit of a struggle in the middle, to get through it. Main character is naive, but, I guess, he is meant to be young-ish (21, but acts 16) due to the nature of the world he lives in. I can't decide if it was worth finishing, or not. So, I guess that makes it mediocre, at best. The plus sides include an approach where rape was seen as a bad thing (unlike a lot of books in this genre where rape is normalized/celebrated), and the characters didn't act in ways that regular people wouldn't have acted. The down sides were the main character's naivety and special ability to know exactly how to do the correct thing at the correct time even though there was no background that would have given him this ability.
    • 3/5
      This is an okay novel, but nothing spectacular. It’s just a nice way to spend a couple nights listening to. It came out of the shoot Like gangbusters, but it really lost steam at the end.
      Nick Podehl is the narrator for the audiobook and he was wonderful at his job.

      3 stars
    • 4/5
      In this zombie apocalypse, an infection is what makes zombies, and you could be carrying the virus for 20 years before it might suddenly activate. Those who might be carrying the virus but haven't turned are tattood with a big plus sign on their left hands for "positive" and sent to medical camps. This happens to the narrator, Finn, after his mother turns into a zombie. This is basically a page-turning road-trip adventure, with lots of bad guys like road pirates and death cultists, and a few zombies to add a constant element of danger and provide an explanation for why all these people are so awful to each other. It was quite epic, in that Finn has a hard time getting to the medical camp in the first place after falling in with some looters, then discovers the medical camp is a hellhole and has to lead an escape and find a new place where the positives can live. I disagree with one reviewer who found no "strong" female characters in this book; I think Kylie was a realistic, well-developed character who reacted understandably to a lifetime of abuse but nevertheless still took care of herself. And I don't think all villains should necessarily be men; it's nice to have a female bad guy every once in a while. For a zombie novel, this one held my attention and kept me engaged all the way through.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      As far as post-apocalyptic books go this is a good book. I found the world really believable. It takes place twenty years after most of the population has been decimated. So I could understand the rest of the human race's need to loot and fight each other. If you are living day by day just trying to survive and it is a dog eat world than you may have to kill just to survive as only the strongest and smartest survive. In this book it really is the humans that are the strongest presence and not the zombies. So if you are a zombie fan than you may be disappointed with the lack of zombies. Also, I found that this book could have been shortened at about 150 pages to even 200 pages and it would have been fine. It takes a while to build up the pacing of the story. However the ending does make up for some of the lack of action.
    • 3/5
      ‘It grows in the dark part of your head like a fungus. All the while eating holes in your brain until it’s a sponge full of virus […] That was what had happened to my mom. For twenty years, ever since the crisis, she’d been dying inside. A little more every day.And maybe it had been happening to me, too.’Finn has lived within the sheltered gates since he was born. The world outside is a complete mystery, yet the stories he’s heard has made him thankful for his safe and sheltered life. The safety is shattered when his mother spontaneously turns and he’s forced out into the mysterious world with a new tattoo; a plus sign on the top of his sign marking him as possibly infected. His only hope is to get to the military camp in Ohio where he can live out his final two years of incubation before he can be accepted back into safety. But two years is a very long time for someone who doesn’t know how the world truly is.The way an author handles the scientific aspects of a post-apocalyptic novel is key. Some authors handle it head on and explain in minute detail and others leave their characters in the dark and simply focus on the survival side of living in the new world. Both work, but if you’re going to attempt to explain the scientific side of things, it best make sense. In this world, it’s been twenty years since the initial outbreak and no one has seen a zombie in fifteen years. Once infected with the zombie virus, the incubation period is apparently anything from twenty seconds to twenty years. So, you get bit, you might be good only for the next hour or you could be fine for the next twenty years, but nobody knows for sure. Since the outbreak happened twenty years ago, I’m not sure exactly how they’ve been able to successfully test that theory. It also isn’t explained how the outbreak happened to begin with, so the science of Positive was definitely lacking for me. One specific line about killing a zombie by stabbing him in the liver also had me baffled. Come on! Zombies don’t give a shit about their livers.Also lacking, was the character development. Our narrator, Finn, is an extremely naive individual when we’re first introduced. Positive acts as his coming-of-age story in a world falling apart at the seams. He’s forced to figure out quickly how to survive and how to adapt his mind to the concept of how things truly work outside of the gates of New York City. In that regards, this story reminded me a lot of Ashfall with our young, male narrator forced to adapt to the new world around him. Obviously, all that was missing were the zombies. Similarly was the fact that both stories focused on the part where humans turn into a whole other type of monster as well. The issue with Finn was how quickly he managed to shed himself of his naivety. It could be said that the things he was forced to experience could speed along that process but it just didn’t feel like genuine progression.The portrayal of female characters was pretty appalling as well. Positive has two main female characters for the most part; one played the role of enemy and the other was meek and submissive (there was one strong female that made a brief appearance but it wasn’t enough to satisfy me in regards to the way the rest of the females were portrayed). The submissive one, well, I suppose it could be argued that she was strong in her own way and got Finn and the rest of their party out of a few sticky situations. It could also be argued that being a victim of abuse led her to this mind frame and that it couldn’t be helped but… Was it really so much to ask that we couldn’t get one strong female main character in this giant 450 page story?Unfortunately, even setting aside the issues I personally had with Positive, what really lessened my enjoyment of this story was the fact that I have read so many stories in this same genre that were simply so much better. Positive didn’t manage to bring anything new to the genre and didn’t have much in the way of originality, but newcomers to post-apocalyptic stories will likely find more enjoyment than I did.