Zombie Bake-Off

By: Stephen Graham Jones

Narrated by: Scott Sowers

Length: 6 hrs and 39 mins

Publisher's summary

It's time for the annual Recipe Days bake-off in Lubbock, Texas. Soccer moms and grandmothers gather to show off their family recipes, learn new secrets for the perfect shortcake, and perhaps earn a chance to be on the famous cooking show, How Would You Cook It, Then? When the bake-off is crashed by a federation of pro wrestlers - including American Badass, Jersey Devil Jill, Tiny Giant, The Village Person, Jonah the Whale, the Hellbillies, and the fan favorite Xombie - all hell is set to break loose. Your heart beats faster as you anticipate who will come out on top in the ultimate showdown of the century: soccer moms or pro wrestlers. Anything can happen. An infected batch of donuts has transformed most of the wrestlers into mindless brain-eaters and the doors of the convention center have been chained shut, leaving the survivors locked inside, forced to fend for themselves against the hungry dead. Possessing the intensity of a shotgun to the face, Zombie Bake-Off is a stripped-down masterpiece of blood and doughnuts from celebrated author Stephen Graham Jones.

©2012 Stephen Graham Jones (P)2013 Recorded Books

How do you make zombies and Pro-wrestling boring?

Really struggled to finish this one. Just slow, poorly paced, uninteresting meh. I really thought pro-wrestling and zombies? This will be great, if not sci-fi channel fantastic, but no.

Just no.

Awesomely twisted zombie tale

This was such a fascinating twist upon the typical zombie tale. Just imagine a group of wrestlers in full on costume & character invading the arena earlier than expected where a womens home show is currently going on. The poor site manager is caught between the catty woman in charge of the show & the smarmy wrestling manager who has one of his men put chained locks on all the doors. Then the wrestlers find the room with the boxes of doughnuts meant for the cops working security for the wrestling match later that evening. The doughnuts that just happen to be kind of contaminated. What follows is a twisted zombie tale like none you've ever experienced before & it leaves you wanting more. This author has a truly unique writing style that creates stories that don't just grab your interest, but pulls you in & makes you think. Highly recommend. I'm super excited about his upcoming release that is coming out on my birthday in May called The Only Good Indians.

Nice diversion with great characters

Jones explores the Zombie motif, comes up with his own twist on it, creates great characters, philosophizes, and tells an unpredictable story. Some days a zombie story is so much better than the real world.
Narrator nails the voice of wrestling, as well.

Not his best

One can tell this is SGJ’s earlier work and he hasn’t yet, in this novel from 2013, fully developed yet. He’s still a good author, but not the great one he will become. He over-uses some of his descriptions and expressions here {one of his favorites being “the idea of (referring to where something used to or should be)” and “like (used in place of ‘seeming’ or ‘as though’ but weirdly not as a simile} . The overall plot and story line, though entertaining, is a bit juvenile and farcical. He also seems to wander off into some vaguely homophobic territory here. But overall it’s worth a listen. This is the fourth read of his I have listened to, and the earliest published of those. His later titles are much better.

Delightfully Absurd

Super fun premise and laugh out loud moments. Over the top characters, which is what you expect when you combine the worlds of professional wrestling, cooking conventions and zombies, right? Jones creates a tale that keeps you guessing! Sowers does a great job with the voices and was the perfect vocal choice to read this story; however, a little more care in the editing would have been much appreciated!

Always fun!

Even though this is isn’t the brilliance that MHIAC and TOGI both are, still a fun slasher.

I so wanted this to be a good listen.

I wanted this to be an entertaining listen with some zombie fun. I was sadly disappointed. The narration isn’t bad exactly, but it isn’t good enough to overcome the stunted editing which emphasizes every extra breath and skipped beat of the narrator rather than smoothing out the rough edges. The story itself staggers around with confused plot hooks and languishing dialogue runs that go nowhere and drive down the pacing of the story to a crawl. This is nowhere near the quality I expect from Stephen Graham Jones, but everyone can have a miss once in a while.