THE DEAD TIMES

RATING:

ZOMBIE RATING:

DESCRIPTION:

Evan Crow wakes up looking at the sky. He has no memory of how he got there, where there is and it takes a bit of investigation just to remember his own name. A bit more detective work and he discovers that he is a survivor of a plane crash in Melbourne - the other occupants, dead but not quite dead enough. Surrounded by these hideous walking dead people rampant with desire to eat his flesh, Evan has no choice but to run into the hostile city beyond. His children are with his father in Tasmania, alone and scared - he must reach them. Travelling through the Zombie-infested city is a day-by-day battle to survive. Having no memory of his past, Evan's mission to be reunited with his children, appears impossible.

MY VERDICT:

This book is reasonable - a fairly average Zombie-flick without much ambition; a guy starts at one end of the city and must get to the other end. It does fairly well at keeping the pace going from around the half-way mark - I found the initial chapters a bit slow with not much happening. Still, the writing is quality and the Zombies are clearly the dumb, slow moving kind from Romero's works, often seen by the main characters in large hordes or trying desperately, and uselessly, to get into barricaded buildings. I would have liked to have read about individual Zombies in sickeningly blood-dripping detail such as missing limbs, gore slick hair or dangling eyeballs - perhaps this is just my morbid curiosity about the undead showing through - rather than approaching ghouls being left with the generic 'Zombie' label. The real kicker for me is the book's ending - and I hesitantly recommend the novel just for this. It is almost a narrative 'two fingers' to the reader but in a good way which is in huge contrast to what you would think is a purely predictable ending.