Books like Hollowland

I can't decide what was worse: the writing quality or the plot of the book? The writing was rough but mostly functional. Amanda Hocking will never be accused of having pretty prose... or character development, but more on that later. The writing is utterly devoid of any emotion. Things happen and the character reacts -- period. There's no tears, no wibbling, no real internal thoughts. In the aftermath of any event the main character, Remy, shrugs off what went down as necessary and that's all. Hm I guess writing style and character development went hand in hand there. Hocking doesn't have the writing range to make her characters vivid or real.The book starts at a gallop and never really slows down, which usually means a relatively good reads if not for how steadily ridiculous the book got. Zombies invading a government facility sheltering people? Awesome. It removes the character from safety and serves as a nice starting point. Remy ditches one of her two friends in the desert after because that friend has been bitten... okay. I guess the purpose of that scenes was to show us Remy can do what needs to be done, but it didn't really do much for me since she had a bare bones emotional reaction to it. Next Remy rescues a circus lion that might eat her... so if the other scene was meant to show me Remy can do what is necessary this scene is to show me... that Remy huffed a lot of glue before the end of the world and has some sort of brain damage? How do we go from practical, no nonsense to whim of save the animal? I know! Because the author thought a lion pet would be ROCKING.Sadly, it only gets worse and more cliche from there. The desert Remy is in turns out to be Las Vegas... big eye roll there. This has been done before. Anyway, Remy fights some zombies in a kitchen in a Vegas hotel by lighting them on fire, which does nothing but make the zombies that are trying to eat her flaming zombies that are trying to eat her. It's stupid and it's a novice move. Remy is not supposed to be a novice. I think the author was visualizing this like a movie, which is fine. I have no problem with that technique because I know it makes for vivid scenes for the reader, but I wish she'd spend a little more time working on it so that perhaps the fire was an accident because she makes Remy look like an even bigger idiot than necessary and undermines all the superhero bullshit she's working on setting up.After the flaming zombies of doom we end up with a cult leader with dozens of underage wives. He spends his time raping a belief in the good lord into them... Oh and somewhere along the way Remy and her friend, Harlow, meet a med-student and a rock star named Lazlo. Yeah. It's all ridiculous. It's like someone on huge prescription uppers and lots of caffeine wrote this book -- someone who had no idea how to develop a freaking character because Remy's got all the emotional resonance of a sock puppet.Dull, lifeless writing and ridiculous plots make this book a skip. I don't even think it's worth the dollar the self-published author was selling it for. Save yourself some time and pop a zombie movie into your dvd player, watch it at 5x speed so you don't have a chance to care for any of the characters, you'll get the gist of this experience.