Rise and Walk

Rise and Walk written by Gregory Solis and published by Hadrian Publishing in 2007 is a horror novel at 222 pages in length with 40 chapters.

Gregory Solis is a Writer, Filmmaker, and Digital Media Artist. He is a graduate of San Francisco State University with Bachelors in Cinema. He currently resides in Northern California.

The cover art for Rise and Walk designed by Gregory Solis, depicting his own bloody decaying hand and wrist resting against what appears to be a tree in darkened woodland. The image was photographed by Christina Grill and edited in Photoshop. The title and author name stand out nicely in grey against such a dark cover, the bottom of the letters of the title are also decaying the closer they are to the hand.

Rise and Walk’s synopsis is a single paragraph which reads like the back of a DVD cover, it is clear to the point and accompanies the title perfectly.

When a meteorite crashes to earth and is collected by an eager professor and his geology class it is the start of the most terrifying summer anyone could ever imagine.

In Rise and Walk by Gregory Solis we meet a number of characters of differing backgrounds in the first few chapters. When the meteorite crashes in the camp site everyone is staying in, it isn’t long before a mysterious green mist puts everyone’s lives in danger.

Trapped in the wilderness we join two groups of people a pair of female camp site workers and two male military wannabe’s partaking in a paintball competition, who have to join forces and learn to overcome their fears if any of them are to survive. Amongst them a female med student Veronica seeks to find out and understand exactly what is causing what appears to be an infection of some kind, but even she knows she is way out of her league.

The book appears to take its time to fully kick off however what is happening is that you are being shown exact details leading to the full outbreak which draws you deeper into the book. There is a lot of blood and gore in this book once the dead Rise and Walk which is from the very first chapter. The descriptions of blood tearing are vivid and leave nothing to the imagination but a hunger for more.

Can the group figure out what is happening and warn civilisation before the walking dead reach town? Can people find it within themselves to save others? To stand and fight? Or run to the hills and hide?

The first line reads Many people are afraid of the dark, well if you weren’t before you may just be by the time you finish reading. It took me three days to finish Rise and Walk and although I could not quite grasp the amount of time spent during the paintball competition, I did thoroughly enjoy the book which brought to mind the old children’s rhyme if you go down to the woods today you’re sure of a big surprise which definitely holds sway with this book, especially since the surprise is a growing mass of bloody reanimating corpses. I can’t wait for the next instalment in the Rise and Walk series titled, Rise and Walk: Pathogen.

I give Rise and Walk by Gregory Solis 4.5 out of 5 stars

By R.N. Hadley