THE DEAD TIMES

RATING:

ZOMBIE RATING:

DESCRIPTION:

The world has gone mad. People, average people, are getting infected by some unidentified virus. The world has grown accustomed to diseases rampaging across the globe, causing lockdowns and social distancing but never one as severe as this. Those infected eventually lose their mind, go completely bald and have skin covered with disgusting red welts. It comes in waves. No one knows why or what is causing it or, more worryingly, how it can be stopped. By the time the fourth wave hits, civilization has crumbled and the infected have started eating the living in the small pockets of survivors that remain.

MY VERDICT:

This book has a good, well-paced ending but the journey there is needlessly drawn-out by cliched, chapters that have no impact on the overall story. With the story treading water for most of the book you'd expect something supremely interesting to suck you in to the narrative but, unfortunately, that is just not the case. It is basically just a spin on the plot of Z Nation where one guy has been contaminated with the Zombie virus multiple times through bites but, unlike the entirety of humanity, this man does not turn into a ravenous Zombie (or 'Baldie' as the book refers to its infected). At the start, he is reluctant to get involved in the fight for the future and has no clue what is going on, why he is so special or why people want to kill him if he might be the key to survival. After a series of misadventures - ultimately, putting him right back where he started -, he comes round to the fact that he is the saviour of humanity and gets more friendly, helpful and cooperative. The novel does put a slight twist on things by adding a race of vampire-like humans behind the scenes, running the show but, to be honest, this just reeks of being included to make an unoriginal story a bit more impactful. There are also hardly any commas in whole of the book where there really should be; thankfully, most sentences can still be made sense of from the context but there are at least a couple of times where the missing punctuation becomes very annoying. On the plus side though, the writing is faultless and flows well (even if a lot of the book should have been left out). Characters are not simple two dimensional props only used to advance the narrative and landscapes are well-described - you can feel immersed in the downtrodden, nightmare world. Overall, I would say Exploited Blood: Book 1: The Onslaught is a decent read, it is just far too bloated with excessive worthless, escapades for me to recommend it.