THE DEAD TIMES

RATING:

ZOMBIE RATING:

DESCRIPTION:

This book is not your typically Zombie book; there is no desperate struggle against a Zombie outbreak, no race to find a cure... It is a book about what happens after you've become a Zombie, imagining that the people the Zombies once were are still there, trapped inside bodies which now feel foreign to them, bodies which cannot be controlled, that move seemingly without reason, bodies that are entirely disconnected from the mind within. Doomed to wander on forever in search of fresh humans to kill, what do these trapped souls think about? What do they do, what can they do? What does it feel like to be one of the walking dead?

MY VERDICT:

I, Zombie must be one of the grimmest, darkest and down-right soul-destroying books I have ever read but, somehow, strangely, I love it. You see, for all the characters in the book, there is no hope, no chance of outlasting a deadly Zombie apocalypse, to see life returning to what it was before, maybe even better than before - they have already lost everything, forever, never to feel happiness ever again, they are already dead, already lumbering ghouls, stuck between life and death. However, they are only dead on the outside; their minds are dwindling - gradually rotting away - but are still intact meaning that 'they' are still intact - alive on the inside but unable to control their bodies. This allows the author to get wonderfully poetic about things referring to the hapless individuals as trapped in prisons of flesh or possessed, but only partially, a demon controlling the body but not the mind. It also brings up some truly interesting points; what if a Zombie's legs are blown off and it's arms broken, rendering it immobile, or can a person feel fear when all sense of life has been taken away from them (the answer is yes by the way). It also provides the book with some of the most disturbing and unpleasant themes imaginable - if the 'torture porn' movie genre can have a novelized version, this book would definitely be it. In one memorable segment, a women Zombie walks barefoot through streets covered in broken glass, tearing her feet with every step, fully able to feel the pain but powerless to do anything about it; her body driven on by the need to feed. I, Zombie does have some minor flaws; it can become a bit drawn-out in its descriptions and there is not that much in the way of a central plot or storyline; it is really just the individual points-of-view of many different Zombies as they trudge through the apocalypse, joined only by their geographical location. Despite these quibbles I really enjoyed reading and would highly recommend it to any diehard Zombie fan.