THE DEAD TIMES

RATING:

ZOMBIE RATING:

DESCRIPTION:

In October 2019, a deadly plague of unknown origin spread across the globe like wildfire, killing those infected within minutes, only to later see them rise up as the living dead. This book is a conglomeration of notes, forum reports and other documents charting the fall of humanity.

MY VERDICT:

This novel is a bit different to the usual fair in that it does not actually tell a single story but many, delving into the lives of everyday citizens on that fateful day in 2019 when the Zombies first appeared. This approach has its ups and downs; some of the material is bordering on high quality reading, some of it is painfully bad. For example, I really loved the opening few pages of the forum reports; it really seemed to capture the sense of widespread hysteria and panic as more and more sources reported the Zombie attacks. It conjured up a feeling of terrific fear in me as I started imagining just how I would react if these events did actually happen in real-life; sporadic and unconfirmed news of the dead coming back to life, eventually being confirmed as more reports started flooding in from other countries - it was gripping stuff! However, there the good ended as I realised just how long the forum section was - the author "milking it" is an understatement. And that's actually the major flaw with the whole book; without a single over-arching story to tell, you end up with the same story told many different ways. The other massive let-down is the crazy number of typos, grammar errors and missing punctuation throughout the novel. OK, you could pass this off as a creative author, mimicking the poor writing talents of the particular people writing these documents, often on scraps of paper without any available spellchecker. This is a valid point but applying this clever dismissal would mean that the majority of the population of Earth has extremely below average writing skill - way too insulting if you ask me (although probably shamefully accurate).