Many thanks to Joe Nassise for sending me a copy of 'Operation Shambling Tide' for review. He's aware that I'm a big fan of his 'Great Undead War' series, whose first two volumes were published in 2012 and 2014. It was Harper Voyager who put a hold on that series so he's been shopping for a new publisher for it and I hope the appearance of this suggests that he's finally found it. This isn't his planned third novel but a separate strand set within the same universe, but with a twist: it's a LitRPG, a serious buzzword nowadays with the success of 'Dungeon Crawler Carl'.

Solomon Drake starts out in a regular war novel, part of a U.S. Army patrol in Afghanistan. He's a sergeant in the 1st Infantry, the Big Red One, the same division his grandfather served in during World War II. Most of his patrol is wiped out, first by an IED and then rocket fire, but he manages to make it out by helicopter, waking up with a head injury in Field Hospital 17. He's still in the Big Red One but he's a private now. It's 1918, even though he was born in 1992. And a heads up display appears in the air in front of him. Now we're in a LitRPG.

He's also not in our world. He's in the alternate universe we know as the 'Great Undead War', the universe where World War I is dragging on and on because the Germans have invented corpse gas, which both turns living people into zombies and resurrects the dead in similar fashion. They serve as literal cannon fodder, meaning that every time the Allies kill one, they have to do it in exactly the right way or he'll get up again and they'll have to kill him all over again.

All this is completely alien to Sol Drake, because he hasn't read Nassise's novels, and so he has to figure it out as he goes along. It's weird enough to find himself in the First World War, given that he won't even be born until 1992, but weirder still to find himself on the front lines about to face a shambler assault. No wonder he freezes, but there's a recognisable steampunk arm to press him into action. I should point out here that this can be read entirely as a standalone novel or as part of the existing series. If you're new to it here, you won't recognise that arm as belonging to Capt. Michael 'Madman' Burke, but that lack of knowledge also won't hold you back in the slightest.

It's probably deeply ironic to talk about realism in a zombie war novel that unfolds according to a logic defined by videogames, but "this is what World War One really was". In fact, if we ignore the opening chapter and the periodic contributions of Sol's mysterious HUD that quantify everything he does in terms of XP, this would be a thoroughly realistic novel about war in the trenches. While there are also zombies, that really doesn't matter much. Are they any more inherently horrific in nature than working burial detail? And no, that isn't what it seems. It's hurling dead bodies onto pyres that never go out because the sheer flow of them never stops.

Just as we have to do when we first load a new war simulation on our PCs or consoles, Sol, who's a highly experienced soldier, has to learn new skills. He doesn't have an M4 any more, not even the M16A2 he trained with in basic. He gets the same M1917 Enfield rifle that everyone else carries. Of course, he has to learn the reality of his new situation too, how to deal with shamblers and an influx of corpse gas. The former means shooting them in the head, as you might imagine, but the latter means getting your mask on quickly enough to not be infected. Sol has to shoot the young man next to him who doesn't.

Of course, the LitRPG side of this novel serves as an overlay in much the same way that Sol's HUD does for him. He can simply knuckle down, shoot as many shamblers as he can and take his turns doing burial duty, hoping that at some point he'll wake up back in his own time. Alternatively, he can figure out how to beat the game. He's a Level 4 Ranger, with health at 45/100 and 72 hours of -35 head trauma. He needs to gain 850 more XP to reach Level 5. As someone born in the nineties, he surely knows what all this terminology means, but he still has to apply it to his situation. What does he have to do to gain that XP, what do levels mean in this context and what's the endgame that he needs to aim for?

I won't dig any deeper into the story because that way lies spoilers but the pivot point arrives as he decides to change the game. He might be stuck in 1918 in every detail, but he hasn't forgotten his life in our present, now his far future. That means that he has knowledge that everybody else doesn't and he decides to put that to use to elevate his situation. That brings him to Prof. Graves, the only character here (as far as I can remember) who also plays a part in the earlier novels. He's a kinda sorta mad scientist and certainly plays that way to the characters who interact with him. Sol works with him just fine.

I liked this a lot, though I'm already a confirmed fan of the series, which gives me quite the bias. I have very little background in LitRPG though, so I'm not sure if my biggest problem with the book is a problem at all or just something inherent to the genre. That's the ending. While the episode arc is wrapped up nicely, with Sol providing a neat gain for the Allies, at least for now, the series arc, if I can think of it that way, isn't. Sol still doesn't know why he's in 1918 with a HUD floating in the air whenever he needs it and so neither do we. That was the first question I had after he woke up in Field Hospital 17 and it isn't answered here. I assume that means that there's another book on the way for him, but maybe that's just how LitRPGs work. I guess we'll find out soon enough. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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