A Did Not Finish... 'Age of the Undead' – C.L. Werner (Aconyte)

Page Count: 333 pages (and I read 202 of those pages so I'd say that I gave it a fair go)

I'm not one for 'New Year's Reading Resolutions', mostly because I'm awful at keeping New Year's Resolutions anyway but also, reading is meant to be fun and setting targets around my reading isn't something that I enjoy. If that's your thing then fair play to you but I'm just not a 'read x number of books by the end of each month' kind of guy.

So
not a resolution then but I have decided to go a little easier on myself and make this year the year where I don't force a read if it's just not working. I don't have a lot of time for reading so why waste that time on a book that I'm not enjoying? And where better a place to start than with a book nestling deep in one of my favourite sub-genres...? Let's talk 'Age of the Undead' and why even zombie books sometimes don't work out for this reader.

When Knight Alaric von Mertz loses his family to a ravenous zombie horde, he swears revenge on the necromancer responsible. But a quest for vengeance is no easy matter in a world overrun by the walking dead. Joined by a sharp-tongued rogue, a witch hunter with secret knowledge, a novice wizard, and a dwarf demolition master, Alaric's journey leads him from magical fire moats to the zombie-ridden catacombs of the witch hunters to uncover a spell book of insurmountable power. As zombies claw and bite, Alaric fears he will never avenge his family. For in this age of the undead, betrayal and magic lurk around every corner, spelling either doom or salvation for them all.

Not a bad book on the face of it and to be fair, there is a lot to enjoy here; the more so I suspect if you've played 'Zombicide: Black Plague', the game upon which this book is based. It has a more or less never-ending swarm of zombies, a crew of engaging heroes and a number of situations that they must negotiate without being eaten. Absolutely your kind of book then, I hear you say, and you'd be right, well... half right. There were bits that I really enjoyed but unfortunately, not enough to stick with the book.

There's an unwritten rule to zombie books (if there isn't then there should be...), pace your book to the survivors, not the zombies. Zombies are awesome but they are slow... Let zombies dictate the speed of the plot and you're left with a book that might have somewhere to go but will take far too long to get there. And that is exactly what happened with 'Age of the Undead', it just took far too long to do what it needed to and I'm patient but not that patient...

And to be fair, the other thing was probably more on me than the book itself. World building isn't the be all and end all but I enjoy it and I like to see a book that is grounded in something. That was exactly what I didn't see in 'Age of the Undead' and that ended up being a deal breaker for me. Having said that though, if I'd played the game at all (which I haven't), it might have been a completely different deal entirely with familiar towns, villages etc. which I didn't get this time. So that one probably can't be blamed on the book but it was still a thing for me and that's a part of what led me to put the book down.

'Age of the Undead' then... I think if you've enjoyed the game then you'll probably get a lot out of this book but with limited reading time as it is, it proved to be a book that I couldn't stick with. Not when there are other books to be read... ;o)

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