Working Stiffs

*Book source ~ A review copy was provided

in exchange for an honest review.

Working Stiffs

Scott Bell

21 March 2017

Sci-Fi | Dystopian

281 Pages

My Rating ~ 4 bites

Joe Warren dropped out of college and he’s unemployed. He’s intelligent, but he’s self-centered. He doesn’t want to get involved and he’s perfectly happy to just drift through life, a loser. The government is very Big Brother and now the technology has advanced to a level of creating Revivants. Basically, they’re zombies. Great for cheap labor, but not much else. Joe, doesn’t care about any of it. Until the day his whole world falls to shit and he has to decide which side he’s on – his own or his fellow citizens’.

A bit slow going in spots and Joe is actually pretty unlikeable. Not in a villain kind of way, but in a what-a-fucking-loser kind of way. I spent nearly the whole book yelling at him to grow a set of balls for fuck’s sake. To take the blinders off about the government and do something. Anything. It’s a lot like the way things are right now with the baby we have as president. The story and our present are too similar. Except for the Revivants. I’m pretty sure we don’t have the technology to make zombies. Do we? Who knows?

I love all the references to pop culture, many of which I actually understood. Wait, does that make me old? Nah. Moving on. The writing is excellent and even though I kinda hated Joe, there are times when he steps up and I grudgingly start to like him. He's got a smart mouth and he can take a beating. Kinda like Harry Dresden in that respect. By the end I really do like him and I think his journey makes for a better character.  The villains, and there are many but Ramirez is the most hated, are truly spine crawling. It’s a look into a What If future and it’s not pretty. Forget Star Trek’s utopia. This future is about as far as one can get from that. Overall, an excellent read.

Just FYI: Marines are not soldiers, they are Marines and they should be capitalized.