Title: Thirteen Hours

Author: Francis Gideon

Genre: Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Paranormal, Zombies, Steampunk, LGBTQ+, Romance (M/M; secondary F/F,) Novella/Short Story













A few starting notes:



I received a free digital review copy of this book via NetGalley. NetGalley provides review copies from publishers in exchange for fair and honest reviews.









A gay steampunk zombie tale set in an alternative Victorian-style London? Dudes, of course I was going to read this!

It also helps that I'd previously read The Invisibles by Francis Gideon, way back among my earlier reviews, and loved it - it's so sweet!



Premise:



Hans may very well have an answer to the zombie crisis that has gripped the country, but his peers in academia won't step out of the realms of theory.

The time has come for Hans, his wife (of convenience) Therese, and her girlfriend Joan, to step up.

They just need a fresh corpse...



Best bits:


Steampunk and batsh** randomness

Zombies. Steampunk. Victorian sh**.

My friends, the sheer randomness of this is exultantly awesome.

The romance aspect is totally bizarre - which may not work for some, but I actually kind of liked it!





Marriage of convenience

I liked the inclusion of Hans and Therese's marriage - a way for them to appear 'respectable' to the London society in which they live.

As a gay man, and a lesbian woman, they see the way for both to be happy as being one in which they marry each other, and never *ahem* consummate things.

Since this was a very real state of permanent closet-hood for many people during the real Victorian period (you know, the one without the steampunk and the zombies,) I think it's inclusion here was very important.





I loved Joan - Therese's girlfriend.

It's always nice to see a positive depiction of a butch lesbian, although I did have some qualms (see next section).

It was also nice that both Therese and Joan were capable, intelligent, women. (Who, might I add, Hans would be a useless lump without.)





This book is also very readable, and quite short (under 100 pages) - so a nice one to stick in the middle of heavier reads.

The author, Francis Gideon, is a non-binary writer of m/m romance. (This is the part where I remind you to support diverse creators!)






Not so great bits:





A couple of things to be aware of content-wise:

- grief
- corpses and medical experimentation
- grave-robbing
- gore
- homophobic society/time period

I think that's about it.

There is swearing. And one relatively graphic m/m sex-scene which you can skip without affecting the story if you want to.





For a lot of people, this whole thing is just going to be too weird.

A lot of people will also not appreciate the randomness - it's not everyone's cup of tea, and to some people it'll just seem too silly and implausible.








Plot-holes ahoy!

There are plot-holes.

I'm not going to go into them, because that would be all spoiler-y.

But there are plot-holes, which I happily skipped over, but which you might not be so happy with.






Being butch is not a class-based identity!

There's just one thing I don't understand:

WHY, given that Joan and Therese grew up in the SAME kids' home, does Therese talk without an accent/dialect, and Joan talk like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins?!

It suggests that Therese, the femme lesbian, is more refined, and of a higher class, than Joan, the butch lesbian.

That bugged me.






Verdict:



Look, if you like batsh** randomness and/or steampunk, zombies, or Victorian-fantasy, you're gonna love it!

If not... maybe look for something else.

A 1.5 star review. I'm being very generous in rounding up.

If goodreads hadn't told me otherwise, I'd have assumed this was Francis Gideon's first book. The plot showed definite potential, but was very poorly executed and the characters were two-dimensional and caricatures. The writing was choppy and needed editing, and at a mere 73 pages, the author wanted to do far too much, and had to rush through the various stages of the plot (which actually turned out to be a good thing... I doubt I would have finished it, had it been much longer). For a book containing zombies, it was awfully tame, with not even the fear of an attack to add tension to the story, and unfortunately the main love-story seemed tacked on and completely unbelievable.

A shame.

This one just didn't work for me. It felt disjointed, as if too many story threads were forced together, and the logic of the story fell apart early on when I found myself on the side of the academic bad guys. As much as the country longs for a cure to the ongoing zombie crisis, turning them into immortal cyborgs hardly seems like the best idea.

For a book that was advertised as the story of Hans, his wife, and her lover, it's really the story of Hans, his scientific discovery, his hurt feelings, and his infatuation with a dead man, a stranger whom he inexplicably wants to wake up and love him.

Character motivations didn't make much sense to me, and the story shifted too often to make sense.