The Retreat Series

Authors: Craig DiLouie, Stephen Knight, Joe McKinney
Narrator: R.C. Bray
Duration: 14h 05m
My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐🌑
Tags: horror - military

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Not the best military book, not the best thriller, but has some action and original plot.

So instead of zombies there are a clowns - people who want to infect other people and laugh when they get pain.

Lot’s of gore, human parts, and scenes of death or destruction.

“Everyone Dies”. It can be another header of the book. After the person is introduced and his motivation and history is described he just turns over and dies. Good way to change scenes and to proceed with plot but after 5th or 10th person it wears off.

Lot’s of radio chatter (similar to Arisen), military terms.

Quotes:

To him and his friends - war was wonderous play. The bad guys went down in a hale of a gun fire. Sometimes a good guy died - a nobel sacrafice played out with plenty of drama. The scenario played itself untill it became a ritual. In the end they went home happy and tired. They faced dangeour and fought through it. The looked death in the eye and walked away.

They’ve been through hell, exauseted and close to the edge, relying on their training to keep it together.

He had a sense of doing time until the rest of his life started.

Imagine you deploy army on the series of hills. From there you command the region. From there the flood comes. The hills becomes islands and your army commands nothing but the ground it’s standing on. And the water keeps rising.

The ability of the army to function depended on following orders. Explicit orders carefully designed by chain of command - sometimes orders sucked. The alternative to dissobey was far worse, particulary in crysis like this. In the end without discipline they werent an army, they were a ravel.

He kept a bottle around for a special occasions - toast a promotion, observe end of operation, that kind of thing. Sharing a shot always made a moment memorable. What he needed it for now is to forget everything.

It was called reset in military parlance, where an over-optimized unit was taken from the line so it can get it collected shit squared away. New faces would fill old spaces and old faces would rotate out to other units and share their experience or simply levave a service and enter a hopefully safer civilian society.

As a black cop he found himself hated by a community he tried to serve, yet not very welcomed by his supposed brothers in blue. He had his feet in 2 different worlds, but he was a stranger in both.