'Dead Stop (Tomes of the Dead)' – Mark Clapham (Abaddon Books)

If you've read this blog for a while (or if you started reading yesterday, either way...), you'll already know that I love zombie movies. Good, bad or that vague area in between, I'll watch them all. What's slightly less well known, but just as true, is that I love my zombie fiction as well. The only difference is that any zombie books that I read have to hit the mark every single time. I've got no idea why I'll let films get away with all sorts but come down really hard on books that don't make the grade. That's just the way it goes round here, but anyway...

I've been looking for zombie books to read and remembered that (way back in the day, when I was a lot more in touch with what was happening with genre fiction) Abaddon Books had a nice little line in zombie fiction, namely the 'Tomes of the Dead'. A quick stop at Amazon reunited me with some old favourites, which I'll get to another time, but also pointed me at 'Dead Stop', a 'Tome' that I'd never seen, let alone read. I promptly bought a copy and read it, yesterday, over a slightly
extended lunch break. And here I am, all ready to tell you what I thought...

HE’S ALWAYS SEEN GHOSTS... BUT THEY’VE NEVER OFFERED HIM A JOB BEFORE.

David Larkin can see ghosts. It’s a blessing – or a curse – that’s been part of his life since his eleventh birthday. It’s not much use to him, and he mostly just tries to ignore them and get on with life, travelling around and keeping to out of the way places where not too many people have died.

Until the ghost of Melissa appears to him, in a forgettable truck-stop diner on a highway in the American Midwest, warning him about the flood of zombies heading his way. Melissa offers him a deal: she’ll help David escape the zombie horde – in exchange for finding her zombified body and destroying it...

Zombies are all well and good but what I find more and more, these days, is that I need them (or the survivors) to be doing something different in the book if it's going to hold my interest. Now... a psychic talking to the ghost of a lady who wants him to kill her zombified body? I'm in, of course I'm in. That blurb really piqued my interest and I had to see how Clapham handled all the good stuff inside. Not bad at all as it happens.

'Dead Stop' is only a hundred and forty four pages long (on the Kindle anyway) but you'd easily be forgiven for thinking that it's longer as Clapham kicks off with an original premise, follows it up with a tense trek through a zombie filled landscape and rounds things off with zombie killing in a laboratory and a twist that you probably saw coming but still manages to leave 'Dead Stop' open ended in that grim, foreboding way where you know that even if you're not going to read about it, someone is still going to get what's coming to them... You can't ask for a lot more than that really. I thoroughly enjoyed the read. It had everything I look for in a zombie book; zombie fights, zombie deaths and tough decisions. Not only that, the hook is baited early on and I couldn't help but keep reading to see what happened to David.

Yeah, the laboratory scenes were a little too 'Resident Evil Movie' for me (not a huge fan, of the first one anyway) but Clapham rescued it by keeping those scenes firmly in the background and chucking a twist at us...

David Larkin was a great character to spend time with. His psychic gift suggests a certain type of story and Clapham gets one over on us early on by making it about something else entirely. It's smoothly done and sets us up nicely to keep moving on with the plot.

I also particularly enjoyed the way that Clapham uses David to sidestep the more boring parts of the journey to the laboratory. Because zombies can be slow and very boring if you're not careful... Not here though, it's David's story to tell and if that means skipping the boring bits, he's not afraid to do just that. Which works out brilliantly for people like me who fancy a lunchtime read and don't want to get bogged down in the detail. Thanks David! :o)

'Dead Stop' ended up being a great way to spend my lunch hour (and a little bit extra but don't tell...) and I'm really glad I took the time to give it a go. Original zombie fiction isn't dead quite yet. I don't know if 'Tomes of the Dead' is still ongoing but there are still a few surprises to be had in this series...

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