The Living Dead

In the beginning there is John Doe. The death of a seemingly nicely dressed homeless person. The autopsy going differently than all others. Luis and Charlie had found patient zero. This begins the zombie apocalypse. While the story continues it separates into storylines that parallel each other. It's almost like reading short stories. For example, stories of a naval vessel, a teenager from a trailer park, a musician, a news station, government workers and two medical examiners all intertwined. You read about each of the characters and how they are doing throughout their apocolyptic experiences. Those important characters because they keep coming back. I don't normally like zombie stories. They're all so similar. Zombies come and kill everyone so people have to arm themselves and aim for the brain. This is similar, but the way the zombies are viewed and treated at the ends makes it unique. The ending has some interesting and unique twists, I really enjoyed. In the end living, dead,

I am a zombie enthusiast, for sure. I have seen several of Romero's movies. So when I won an ARC of this book, I was ecstatic. I will start by saying the book did not disappoint, but I do have some feedback. So, for starters, this book is a WHOPPER. The unedited ARC I received came in at a whopping 650 (ish) pages. Which, honestly, is quite a lot to me. The characters were interesting and beautifully written. I liked and hated bits and pieces of every one of them, which is kind of the point. I loved that toward the end of the book, all of the character stories came together several years down the road. That takes a level of attention to detail that most writers just don't have. And incorporating the few chapters from the zombie point of view (and the zombie getting the last word) were a truly unique and amazing touch. For critiques, the writing was overdone in places. The style was (mostly) beautiful but in other areas it took on this feel of being almost Dickensian in how lengthy descriptions of small things were. I am also aware that Romero (I am pretty sure) preferred the term ghoul. I didn't love the revert back to using zombie. I thought the other uses of terms showed the way the ghouls were viewed differently by everyone who encountered them, but there were just so many different ways they were referenced. And the ending... I won't spoil it, but it was so anticlimactic after 600+ pages. I did really enjoy the separate ending for the zombie character that had been threaded through the story, it was beautiful. But the ending for the humans was really no ending at all. Definitely didn't leave me feeling warm and fuzzy after, but I guess books about zombies aren't supposed to do that.

When it's not failing at it's attempt at social commentary straight out of the left wing SJW playbook there's some good stories being told. Unfortunately they get ruined by the annoying attempts at being "woke"