THE DEAD TIMES

RATING:

ZOMBIE RATING:

DESCRIPTION:

A team of archaeologists are sent on a mission to Russia to investigate a long-lost Cold War-era radar station. However, while there, two of their number come down with an unknown sickness - a disease that makes those infected highly aggressive and hungry for human flesh. The infection soon spreads; consuming the archaeologist team and the crew of the ship chartered to take them into that wintery hell.

MY VERDICT:

This is, by far, the worst Zombie book I have ever read - I would have given up on it were it not for the brevity of the novel. It may not look painfully short from the width of the book, but lines are double-spaced and the font is fairly large; a clear tactic to make the book seem more worthwhile than the simple, unoriginal 'people discover illness and battle to survive it' story is. The narrative is not helped by the unforgivable number of errors in the text; many sentences do not even make sense, tense is constantly switched between past and present, there is missing punctuation throughout and, when there is punctuation, it is often duplicated or in the wrong place making the difficult to understand sentences even harder to diagnose. The only minor positive I can scrounge up for this review is that the relationship and group dynamics between the team of archaeologists is, when understandable, quite convincing. They seem like a band of co-workers lumped together that do not really like each other nor have any shared marine-like comradery.