Survive The Cursed by Ashton Abbott; The End is A Monster Mash-Up

 

Survive The Cursed by Ashton Abbott; The End is A Monster Mash-Up

By Julie Sara Porter 

Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: There have been many Post-Apocalyptic works of fiction that predict the future will be overrun with supernatural monsters that will destroy humans and become the dominant species. Zombies are the most frequent survivors. Vampires have also had a shot at living forever in the Post-Apocalyptic wasteland. Occasionally, werecreatures and very rarely witches and other magic users come out to play in these future games. Well, Survive The Cursed seems like a novel length explanation that the author , Ashton Abbott couldn't decide which monsters to be the primary antagonists, so she decided on all of them.

In the future, humanity is reduced to living in enclaves on abandoned areas like Avery Winters does with her parents and other assorted humans in what used to be Eglin Air Force Base on the Florida panhandle. On a personal note, my father was in the Air Force and we lived in Eglin for a time from 1985-1987. I attended elementary school grades 2-4 there, so it is a fascinating and eerie experience reading about and imagining a place that I once lived becoming part of a Post-Apocalyptic universe. But I digress.

Anyway, Avery and the other humans hunt for monsters and kill them in brutal attacks. They study the movements, strengths, and weaknesses of witches, zombies, vampires, and werecreatures, find out where they are located, and kill or imprison them before they attack the humans. 

It's a difficult life and Avery has grown jaded and used to the constant fight against these monsters. She is old enough to remember life before the monsters, usually through minor things like eating cereal, wearing different clothes, or going to school or friend's houses. That's all gone as humanity has almost completely been wiped out except in small pockets and everyone has to fight and struggle to survive. 

Fighting for survival is such a new normal for Avery, that she is deprived of empathy, understanding, or compassion. She is so driven to kill the monsters that she ironically has lost her own humanity. She ignores the medical experiments that her father performs on the monsters that are captured. She vows that if one of her fellow soldiers is transformed into a monster, she would kill them without a second thought. She demonstrates this during an assignment when a couple of her closest friends are attacked by zombies and become zombies themselves. 

Avery only sees the monsters as cardboard adversaries until she is assigned guard duty over the imprisoned monsters. She is forced to look her enemies in the eye and converse with them. She particularly captures the interest of Whitney, a saucy temperamental Witch who wants to go down fighting and Mattias, an enigmatic and calm Vampire who wants to plead his case to his captors. 

The longer that Avery talks to and listens to her captives' perspective, doubt enters her mind. She questions the purpose of her fellow human’s, particularly her father's motives with his experiments. Avery admires Whitney's defiance and tenacity and is drawn to Mattias’s charismatic personality and almost human appearance. 

Before the monsters were a monolith, something easily destroyed and disposed of. Now she has to concede that they have names, identities, families, emotions, personalities, and possess admirable traits that she never considered. 

A twist occurs that causes Avery to challenge everything that she once believed. She is ostracized and her concept of friends and enemies have reversed. She sees humanity in those she thought of as monsters and monstrosity in those she thought of as human. It makes one wonder if there is any real distinction between human and supernatural characters and where the monsters begin and end.