THE DEAD TIMES

RATING:

ZOMBIE RATING:

DESCRIPTION:

An illness is ravaging the world; no one knows where it came from, what to call it or how it spread so quickly, but, before any answers can be found, it arrives in Portland, Oregon. The pathogen has the power to bring any living being it kills back from the dead; slow, merciless, walking corpses with an insatiable lust for human flesh. The Zombie apocalypse has begun and the lives of thousands are about to be changed forever. From the first terrible night, eight men and women bear witness to the mayhem that ensues. This is their story, their tale of misery and woe. This is the story of the world's slow and dismal, end.

MY VERDICT:

This Rotten World is overall, a 'good' book; one that I would recommend, that treads ground that many other Zombie novels shy away from, but, sadly, there are simply too many niggles for it to achieve that perfect score it so badly desires. First off with negatives is that the novel is hard to get 'into'; the first few chapters all deal with different characters and, while I'm really glad the author does not waste time in getting to the Zombie uprising, there are just so many different characters (it seems), all with different backstories, it can be really difficult to keep up. This problem, in itself, would not be too bad of an issue were it not for the mind-splitting number of errors in the book. Pretty much, throughout the entire lengthy novel, words are being misspelt, left out or confused with other words - the text even manages to mix-up character names at times which is really frustrating. However, there are a lot of plus points here too, chiefly the writing and the whole narrative. The characters are never bland, you'll start to care for each one and, on more than one occasion, a character I thought would survive until the end, perished after just a few chapters, bringing, not only a sense of tension, that anyone could die at any point, but also brilliantly conveying the momentum of a Zombie apocalypse; you can never stop, never rest. The action rarely lets up, keeping you hooked until the end, again, focusing on that 'always keep moving' mentality. I do also really like how the narrative 'jumps' between characters in various locations - it can seem a bit jarring at first but impactfully drives home the point that this Zombie outbreak is just a part of a world-eclipsing apocalypse; the dead are rising all around the globe, not just near our 'heroes'. There are memorable Zombie descriptions too as the book does not shy away from the nasty details; Zombies missing arms, tentacles of blood left where limbs were ripped off or a staggering corpse with an eyeball dislodged, the loose eye hanging by a thread of optic nerve, bouncing off the brainless ghoul's chest as it walks.