A 'Did Not Finish'... 'Zombie Apocalypse' - Stephen Jones

What...?? A book about zombies and I didn't finish it? Well, it can happen and yesterday it did. To be fair, I don't think it was entirely the book's fault, my brain is all fogged up, with Covid, and that's never conducive to a good reading experience. Even so... Well, we'll get to that in a minute.

I saw 'Zombie Apocalypse' in the Catford British Heart Foundation shop and thought it might be a good one for my eldest daughter who enjoyed 'The Girl With All The Gifts' and wants to read more zombie books. She's in Plymouth right now though, and I was after something to read, so I thought I'd have a little re-read (I last read it fourteen years ago) before she got back. And that is where we begin...

In the near future, a desperate and ever more controlling UK government attempts to restore a sense of national pride with a New Festival of Britain. But construction work on the site of an old church in South London releases a centuries old plague that turns its victims into flesh hungry ghouls whose bite or scratch passes the contagion on to others.

'The Death' soon sweeps across London and the whole country descends into chaos. When a drastic attempt to eradicate the outbreak at source fails, the plague spreads quickly to mainland Europe and then across the rest of the world.

Told through a series of interconnected eyewitness narratives, this is an epic story of a world plunged into chaos as the dead battle the living for total domination.

Now don't get me wrong, there is a lot to love about 'Zombie Apocalypse', there was just a little too much for me this time. What we've got here is a book that likes to take it's time setting up setting up the background, parceling information for the reader and then getting to the story itself. For this book, it's exactly the right approach to take . I don't think I've ever seen a zombie apocalypse this meticulously assembled and it really shows on the page with a clear danger ignored in order to score political points, despite the best attempts of Professor Margaret Winn to raise the alarm (and what a price she paid for it...) The result is inevitable but so clearly drawn that you can't help but follow it through; watching sporadic bouts of violence slowly become something far larger.

And that is the tone for the rest of the book, moments of human tragedy set against an all engulfing wave of the undead. I'm not going to go into that in detail, lets just say that all the contributing authors brought their 'A-Game' to this book (ok, Sarah Pinborough's diary entries were particularly heartbreaking).

So, having established that 'Zombie Apocalypse' is a book that's definitely worth checking out, why the 'Did Not Finish'? Well... The heavy emphasis on dropping information was initially a good move but I felt that it could have been dialed back the further we got into the book. Ultimately, I wasn't up to a 'dense read' and 'Zombie Apocalypse' beat me, simply by having too much to say when maybe, it would have been best served by letting the plot just run.

That's just me though and like I said, 'brain fog' doesn't make reading easy. Your mileage will vary and I'd thoroughly recommend this book anyway. If you fancy another perspective, you can read my (Covid-Free) review from way back in 2010, God I feel old now...