THE DEAD TIMES

RATING:

ZOMBIE RATING:

DESCRIPTION:

The world as we know it has been shattered; all but one tenth of the population wiped out by infectious bacteria. Those infected do not die outright, oh no, that would be too easy. Death is the inevitable end but, along the way, the infected become extremely hostile, loosing kindness, emotion and all semblance of their former rational selves. Lee Harden, a US soldier locked away in a fully-supplied and impenetrably secure bunker as part of a special defence project, emerges thirty days after the outbreak began, finding nothing but the decaying remains of civilisation. Heading out into the wastes, he has only one mission; survive, rescue, rebuild.

MY VERDICT:

This novel falls into the Zombie category - but only just. There is an infection - apparently global, although the book skims over this issue - that causes people's brains to decay, leaving only the baser instincts like killing and running, occasionally speaking but never forming complex sentences. The infected come at the living with knives and other crude weapons, they work in packs, bonding together to aid their hunt, and actively track their prey over significant distances. They never actually attempt to eat people though; it's more akin to The Crazies than Dawn of the Dead. That said, the book is a "page-turner" that I found hard to put down. While lacking in originality and breadth - there are no big plot twists -, the writing style is short and tense, keeping things moving along. Unfortunately though, the narrative, however taut, frantic and fast-paced is annoyingly shallow; characters really aren't given much in the way of a background, the ending is more of a "to be continued" line break than an actual ending and the question of how the infection started in the first place goes pretty much unanswered.