by J Malcolm Stewart:
In the pages of Julianne Snow’s novella Days with the Undead: Book One, no aspect of the Zombie Apocalypse goes unexplored.
In this 143 page (on Kindle) extended short, Snow creates drama and pathos in situations as familiar to horror fans as the local multiplex, and she dissects and reveals each aspect of the Zombie film litany and examines it in turn.
Her heroine, Julie starts as just your average Toronto health care worker… At least until the beginning of the end begins. When it does, her and her companions decided it is more noble to flee to Michigan than to be eaten in Ontario.
Thus begins a harrowing, sometimes mysterious journey from Canada’s eastern seaboard to America’s heartland. And, after surviving the usual zombie madness, the book’s heroine tells us about her exploits with the most recognizable way possible in the information age. She blogs about it.
An interesting hybrid of survival story, travelogue and motif examination, Days with the Undead brings us to a territory, while well worn, is also surprising with its willingness to explore how the mechanics of a zombie outbreak would proceed in a population center (or should that be centre?) like Toronto. Fans of the genre will be overjoyed to read of Julies’ musings on such familiar themes as herds, crawlers and even the now-ubiquitous idea of a Patient Zero (liberally borrowed from Jonathan Mayberry’s World War Z mythos).
Snow leaves no theme unpunished as her not-so-merry band tries to stay ahead of the escalating problems living with the undead. Things in her world get more than a little crazy. Three words of awesomeness for the die-hard zombie lover: Flesh-Eating Chipmunks. And with out giving any spoilers, the story’s resolution evokes the gritty hopelessness of such end-of-the-line classics as The Road and On the Beach.
Overall, Days is an fast moving genre read, though the first-person device of the blog makes the narrative a little stiff at times. I also found myself a little confused at slow moving nature of the news about Toronto’s zombie outbreak which dominates the story’s early chapters. While perhaps a sly commentary on the digital divide in Red State America, I found it broke down the believability of the storyline.
There also are a few plot elements that require some leaps in logic to grasp (IE: people in Europe letting North American travelers enter their shores after they hear news of the outbreak), but, in all honesty, they are nothing out of the ordinary for this kind of “this-is-the-way-the-world-ends” story.
Hopefully, some of these flaws will be addressed in the foreshadowed sequel. But, if you’re looking for a quick, hard hitting zombie read, you could do worse than stopping here.
Days with the Undead: Book One is available on Amazon.com.
J. Malcolm Stewart is a Northern California-based public relations/marketing professional. He holds degrees in Political Science and Comparative Religion, but can have a conversation someone without starting a small war. Long interested in suspense, thrillers and horror, he writes and reviews on the subject for websites far and wide. When he’s not writing, reviewing or reading, you can find J. Malcolm riding around Northern CA with something radioactive in his trunk.
Follow J. Malcolm on Twitter: @sabbathsoldier, and learn more about him at http://about.me/jaymal.
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