So are there any *good* zombie-apocalypse novels out there?

[Oni Koneko Damien]

I'll admit right off the bat that I like zombies. Yes, I know they're sucky monsters, yes I know how they're implausible, and can't fight the military, and are largely the abused playthings of fatty nerds with lawless, survivalist wank-fantasies. I still like them. Maybe one of the reasons is subconsciously I'm just as bad as any fattynerd and have my own wanktastic survivalist fantasies, but I'm damned certain that's not the only reason.

Anyways, I like to think of myself as just slightly more discerning when it comes to zombie media, especially in novel form. I know the shortcomings of the genre, and would much rather see them addressed in interesting fashions rather than avoided altogether. I also prefer to hold any zombie-based works to the same standard I hold any novel, just because there are zombies doesn't mean good characterization, basic character intelligence and a compelling plot are suddenly no longer requirements. I have any number of zombiefilms I can watch if I want nothing more than to see hordes of people get killed twice each in a variety of interesting ways. Likewise I don't give zombie media a free pass when it comes to barely concealed political/social messages.

Basically, I'm asking around here if anyone knows of any actually good zombie books out there. The apocalyptic-scenario ones are preferred, but anything where zombies and the threat pose are a major portion of the plot will do. I tried looking online at Amazon, Goodreads, Borders and a few other sites, but it's really hard to pick anything decent out when reviews seem to be mostly composed by, yes, fatty nerds. Since it appears that zombie novels have an even higher crap-to-quality ratio than most other subjects, I am much warier of just taking a risk and spending money on one. As a general yardstick reference, I consider World War Z to be on the slightly low-end of mediocre.

In pre-emptive return for any good suggestions, I'm giving my own personal reviews of the two best zombie novels I've read so far.

Warning: Massive spoilers follow for a pair of relatively obscure books.

Paroxysm, by Gremlin

Plotline in a sentence: Zombiebug is released, spreads across earth, small groups of survivors cling desperately to life.

Good points:
- Makes a good faith effort to provide a valid scientific explanation for the zombies. Though it falls back on effectively magical 'necrochondria' which somehow sustain the body oxygen-free and prevent decay/wear and tear, up to that point it appears to be rather plausible in my poorly educated view.
- There are almost no overt 'messages' in the book. Nothing. Politics, religion, and more make plenty of appearances, but there are no 'mouthpiece' characters or obvious signs that one way or another is right. There is one brief instance of author-bias on an issue which qualifies my statement as an 'almost', which will be covered later in the review, but the entirety of that message takes up about half a page in an over six-hundred page novel.
- Shows a really good and scary view of the breakdown of society. Stages from initial panic, to widespread violence and lawlessness, to civil war and waves of undead, to just a sea of undead across the land are shown in beautiful detail. Moreover, none of it is shown as something desireable, or some sort of survivalists' paradise. It is bluntly shown as the desperate hell it likely would be.
- There is no happy ending. More of a personal favourite of mine. Humanity does not win, there is no miracle cure. The most positive note that could be found is that one or two pockets of survivors manage to come to some sort of reconciliation with the fact that this is how their lives will play out, and that at least life on earth will go on even after humanity's gone, for what that's worth.
- The zombies are genuinely scary, not because of their threat, but because of the sheer empathy you get from their descriptions, this is covered in depth in the actual review.

Bad points:
- Zombies defeat the military... somehow. The majority of the novel takes place in the US, and while the country is crippled by panic and riots long before the zombies hit, there are still a few spots where military-engagements are described. There is no real explanation of how slow, unarmed zombies can overcome armed, trained military units back up with artillery and air support. This is especially glaring as at one point in the novel a single trained man with a pistol and a couple thousand rounds of ammo holds off zombies for over sixteen hours before exhaustion takes its toll.
- The timeline goes a little too rapidly. Basically the entire world is engulfed in a mostly fluidic-transfer zombie-plague with a 30-ish hour incubation period in just over a week. This is explained with an extrapolation graph made from the first couple encounters and patient-zero. According to the graph, one zombie bites an average of fifty people. Thirty hours later those fifty bite fifty more each, another thirty hours, those two thousand five hundred bite fifty more each, exponential growth. It completely fails to take into account military response, civil awareness and resistance, and the simple fact that any large infestation will simply run out of living human targets on a local scale, slowing the spread while they wander around looking for more food.

Review:

This is easily my favourite zombie-novel ever, and one of my favourite books ever. Long story short, it is the best version I have ever seen of the 'normal' zombie apocalypse scenario.

The zombies are as close to non-supernatural as you can get. They are the usual disease-type zombies. Those bitten by one get infection, their health worsens over a period of thirty or so hours, vital signs pretty much cease, then the person gets back up and starts looking for fresh meat. There is an airborne component to the disease as well which zombifies those who have compromised immune systems, namely people who have just died. So it's the usual infected-bites combined with the usual rising-corpse scenarios.

It's the description of this, in my opinion, which is one of the best parts of the entire book and which qualifies it as genuinely scary. Basically the disease is really bad. It came from a frozen dinosaur bone in the Antartic, transferred to a paleontologist who accidentally got his finger frozen to the bone. The disease consists of two parts: A fluid-transferred retrovirus that compromises the immune system of the host, and an airborne zoonotic bacteria that has 'necrochondria' which render the body mostly independent from oxygen and somehow preserve it from the wear-and-tear that normally occurs after death.

The scary bit is how this impacts the infected. After being bitten, the virus and bacteria, among other ill effects, slowly start to deprive the brain of oxygen. This creates a steadily growing headache in the victim which no amount of painkillers can alleviate. Eventually the headache goes far beyond the migraine point as the brain is ever more oxygen-starved, and that's when the bad stuff starts happening. The zombies are all 'alive', if only just. The brain is kept just barely brushing the point of death and fed a trickle of oxygen to survive, while the body tools about under orders from the bacteria to find other, warmer bodies to bite. The victim remains conscious during all of this, experiencing everything, controlling nothing, unable to sleep, cry, vomit, breathe or even blink, and the whole time he is suffering a never-ending, post-migraine level headache. All of this is laid out in vivid detail in the novel, and it is why these zombies are so scary. Not because of the threat they pose, but because if you're bitten, you are condemned to a never ending, agonizing hell, and so is every one of the shambling figures around you, and there's nothing any of you can do about it.

As mentioned, the story starts with an accident at a paleontological dig in the Antarctic. A paleontologist accidentally touches a -150 celsius bone with an exposed finger, is frozen solid, and elects to cut a few layers of skin off his finger rather than risk damaging the bone. Bone is damaged anyways, a few chips land in the wound, thaw, and he's infected with an 80 million year old disease. He's flown to a New Zealand hospital as his condition worsens. Between the airport and the hospital, he reanimates inside the ambulance, causes it to crash, manages to attack and bite over a hundred and fifty people before he's shot down, and there goes the world.

The story follows several groups of survivors as the world burns to the ground, centered mostly in the US. One group is the Antarctic research team, who eventually realize they may be the last living people on the only zombie-free continent on Earth. A CDC team trying to figure out how to cure the virus and eventually stuck inside a military base with an undead horde outside. An ex British spec-ops soldier and two internet webmasters on a cross-country trip trying to get to what they view as the safest possible location in a zombie-apocalypse, Rykers Prison in New York City. And finally a televangelist who, in the midst of the apocalypse, has a spiritual re-awakening and forms a cult of other survivors around himself.

Like I said, there is one point in the novel where author-bias quite plainly shows through. I actually know Gremlin, the author, and have spent years talking to him online, before, during, and after the writing of the novel. While I think he's generally an awesome guy, I also know he's a little irrational about smoking and firmly believes that the harm cigarettes do is vastly overblown by the media and medical establishment. This shows up once in the book, over the course of about a half page, never shows up again and is in no way relevant to the plot. You can skip over it and miss nothing, but coming up on it unexpectedly can be quite jarring to one's SoD and more than a little annoying.

Other than that, I think the book is nothing short of incredible and heartily recommend it to practically anyone.

----------

The Dead, by Mark E Rogers

Plotline in a sentence: The Book of Revelations was mostly right, the dead rise, the sinners are judged.

Good points:
- An underrated take on the zombie-genre. It's not biological, it's not an alien thing, these ones come directly from hell and have a sentient grudge against the living.
- There are no bones made about the religious overtones of the book. The Christian worldview is proven generally correct, and many people are surprised to find out that really isn't a good thing.
- These zombies are fucking scary. No head shots, they don't shamble. They run, they don't stop moving until they're almost completely pulped, they can use vehicles and weapons, and a number of them can speak.
- The lead up to the apocalypse is very well done, with a general increase in creepy events, blatantly supernatural occurrences and foreboding dreams experience by the entirety of humanity before shit simply hits the fan.

Bad points:
- While there's plenty of good religious debate and great dialogue, I feel (and I admit that as an atheist I'm highly biased) some of the better arguments about the fundamentally unjust nature of a hypothetical god were very under-represented or handled poorly.
- The book is pretty obviously self-edited. While well-written, there are a number of grammatical and spelling gaffs throughout the text, enough that it begins to form a distraction as you read on.
- The last fifteen or so pages of the novel consist of the biggest dropping of the metaphorical ball I have ever seen in a written work, doubly so considering how incredible everything had been up to that point.

Review:

I really want to like this book, and for the most part, I do. It is incredibly well written, despite the noticeable grammatical and spelling errors throughout, and paced pretty damn well in my opinion. It follows a small group of people on an island-town in Maine who get caught up in a worldwide Biblical apocalypse. There are plenty of warning signs leading up to it, but in the end there is nothing anyone can really do to stop it.

It first starts with the Rapture. A number of people go missing all at once, simply disappearing, leaving anything they had on their person at the time behind. The number's a little higher than the mere 144,000 given in the Bible, but I really didn't mind that inconsistency. The effects of this are pretty believable. No one really connects it to Biblical prophecy at first, they're just stunned at the flood of missing-persons reports going on all over the US and other places besides. There's also the matter of small number of airline crashes and similar accidents as several of the Raptured were pilots and the like. Following this, everyone in the world has a dream in which a bright figure judges them as unfit for salvation.

Things get worse rapidly, over the next few days there is a noticeable downturn in temperatures worldwide. No one has any idea how its happening until observatories notice that the Sun actually appears to be getting weaker. At the same time, many technological items throughout the world start to fail for no apparent reason. Satellites and other forms of long-range communication are the first to go, followed by complex electronics, and a number of vehicles start to operate sporadically and sluggishly, if they start at all.

At this time, shit hits the fan. Over the course of a few seconds, every single human corpse in the world gets up and starts attacking the living. These are not your typical wussy zombies, either. They can sprint, they have strength bordering on superhuman and a never ending stamina, they can take an entire clip from a fully-automatic rifle and keep coming. They are scary as all fuck. With long-range communication down and a majority of their vehicles and heavy artillery nonfunctional, the army is quickly surprised and overwhelmed by waves of the dead. Over the course of a few hours, a majority of humanity is killed off, and most of them have risen to join the dead.

The story, as said, focuses mainly on just a few survivors in a small town located on a small island just off the coast of Maine. Among them you have a spread of a 'casual Christian', an evangelist who secretly doubts, a fervant Christian who still tries to remain reasonable with others, and an atheist who is willing to accept the Biblical nature of what's going on, but doesn't want to jump to any conclusions regarding his own faith yet.

They mostly run back and forth on the island, trying to keep one step ahead of the uber-zombies as members of their group are picked off one after the other. They soon find out that the zombies aren't immediately killing any survivors they come across. Instead the survivors are dragged by chains until they're too exhausted to go out, then either choked to death or covered in gasoline and set on fire.

Eventually the group discovers the source behind the zombie invasion. An entity called 'Legion' who has split itself into several thousand copies, each infesting an exceptionally large corpse in various locations throughout the world to oversee the apocalypse. After a few encounters, Legion (who is pretty well written in my opinion as a sarcastic, cruel demon in a human-corpse's body) reveals that he can't overtly harm anyone whose faith is pure, but will do anything to lead others astray, then torture them to death, then condemn them to Hell and using their agony and anger there to power the corpses which are currently hunting other survivors down.

It's all really well written and genuinely creepy. There is a feeling of complete hopelessness in the scenario. Temperatures around the world hover around the freezing mark or below, the dead are everywhere and quickly and efficiently hunting down any survivors. There is no place you can hide, no safe spot you can run to, it's just a matter of time before they catch up to you, or you become too exhausted to keep running, and then your hell as just begun. You will be tortured, then killed, but even then you will not rest because you will experience pain worse than you ever thought possible while alive, and it will never end.

Incredibly well written, wonderfully scary... then it drops the ball, and it drops it hard.

The last fifteen pages hurt, big time. Basically, when things are at their most hopeless, the few survivors left suddenly discover that certain acts of purity, selflessness and faith can redeem you and spirit you away from the ravening hordes. What these acts are is never exactly explained. For one couple it was just mindlessly standing in the way of a tide of zombies, for another it was allowing himself to be tortured while others ran, for another it was... taking a communion cracker while zombies were peeling his skin off. Yeah.

Then it gets worse.

The survivors end up in heaven, which looks just like earth but brighter and warmer. The ascended dead and the raptured say hi to them, and explain that everything's fine up here. The question actually gets asked: Exactly what is just and right about any of this?

Yes, they actually ask that question, because that question has been on my mind for a long time. I thought this was the perfect opportunity to turn the normal religious message on its heel. This book could defy the conventions and show that maybe God isn't exactly all-just or all-benevolent.

But no, it's just stated that God has a Plan and it's a good Plan... AND EVERYONE ACCEPTS THIS! That's it, story's over, the end. Oh, the billions suffering in Hell? Well... look over there, a conveniently distracting angel!

So yeah, incredible book so long as you just tear the last fifteen or so pages out. Otherwise, huge fucking disappointment.

[The Cooler King]

Haven't read the first book you mentioned, but I'm a HUGE fan of The Dead. If you hadn't mentioned it, I'd have brought it up. I read it WAAAY back when I was right out of high school. That edition was pretty good, with nothing in the way of grammatical errors and such (it was a standard paperback), but I came across newer printings, complete with art from the writer, that do seem to confirm the self-edited nature of the manuscript. The themes of the book bothered me profoundly when reading it, but they come across as pretty juvenile now. Still, the setup and the nature of the zombies themselves are pretty goddamned terrifying, as is Legion himself.

Anyway, I'd agree with pretty much all your points in the review. The whole 'do something good to get saved' thing was obviously something the writer came up with so that not all of the characters ended up as eternally-tormented zombies. And I have to admit, I've never been able to listen to 'Der Kommisar' the same way again...

[Spekio]

How about "CELL", by Stephen King?
It's kind of a zombie book, but not quite. And the "Infection" is somewhat plausible.

[Sinewmire]

- These zombies are fucking scary. No head shots, they don't shamble. They run, they don't stop moving until they're almost completely pulped, they can use vehicles and weapons, and a number of them can speak.

You mean people?

Have you read I Am Legend? I know it's obvious, but there are some people who haven't read it. OK, they're vampires, not zombies, but the end result is largely the same.

[NecronLord]

If you don't mind franchise fiction, I'm reading Cadian Blood at the minute, a 40K book about an operation against zombies. The trick to making them resist here is having the chaos cult that created them still around, largely infesting the old planetary defence force, and fully armed as well.
Spoiler

Also, the Death Guard are about to arrive in force.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

You mean people?

No, I mean zombies. You can cut their heads right off and they still keep coming after you, they never run out of energy, and they tend to be quite a bit stronger than the average person.

[NecronLord]

Of course, one world falling to zombies doesn't really count as much of an apocalypse in 40K terms.

[Raxmei]

I've read reviews that said the Cadian Blood actually had very little zombie content. How would you rate its content of zombies, human on zombie violence, and grim darkness of the far future? Also, was the book any good?

[Bob the Gunslinger]

The 'problem' with Cadian Blood is that the zombies are portrayed in almost a Stardestroyer.net fashion: they exist merely to die in the thousands under the firepower of the Cadians and only manage to kill a few soldiers when the real enemy (the armed cultists, Death Guard) keep the Cadians too busy to kill all the corpses. Personally, I liked that portrayal because I felt it was more reasonable than a force with artillery and automatic weapons being threatened by the equivalent of a pack of rabid dogs. Also, the Cadian treatment of their Commissar was pretty entertaining by the end of the book.

Also, Damien, I tend to agree that sapient, super-strong 'zombies' who use weapons don't really count as zombies. They seem more like revenants or some other form of undead. If that's what you're looking for, try The Reality Dysfunction. The dead come back pissed...and they have spaceships! Also, Stephen King's Pet Sematary uses some pretty interesting undead and is very creepy. If you like short stories, check out the works of David J. Schow, a writer for Fangoria credited for inventing the "Splatterpunk" genre. He has many stories about zombies in a collection called "Zombie Jam", and has written one of the most disturbing stories I've ever read (though it isn't actually scary) called "Wake Up Call" or something like that.

[NecronLord]

I've read reviews that said the Cadian Blood actually had very little zombie content. How would you rate its content of zombies, human on zombie violence, and grim darkness of the far future? Also, was the book any good?

Yeah, surprisingly little zombie stuff, and for the most part, the zombies perform as you'd expect Zombies to perform against elite Imperial Guard; which is to say, one shot one kill. But it does present them operating in a plausible enough way to be a threat, they're reasonably intelligently directed, and so on.

Haven't finished it yet, so I can't really give a judgement on its overall result, I'll PM you when I do. The guard characters are quite well done for a 40K book. Also, the Captain has a cyber mastiff. Which is always cute.

[Serafina]

There is a preview-PDF for Cadian Blood available on the Black Library website.

I don't know if it contains any major spoilers etc., since i have (at the date of writing this post) neither read the preview nor the actual book - just posting it in case anyone is interested.

[adam_grif]

Zombies are a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine, but I stick to movies for them. I was going to read some Max Brooks stuff, but then internet fucktards turned me off them completely after they started wanking on about the ZOMBIE SCIENCE in his books and how they are VERY PLAUSIBLE.

[DPDarkPrimus]

You mean people?

No, I mean zombies. You can cut their heads right off and they still keep coming after you, they never run out of energy, and they tend to be quite a bit stronger than the average person.

Since when do zombies still persist after the head is destroyed.

[Revy]

Since when do zombies still persist after the head is destroyed.

The Necromorph space zombies from the Dead Space series. Removing their heads doesn't even slow them down, the only real way to stop them is to remove their limbs so they can't actually physically come at you anymore.

[adam_grif]

Not zombies, except maybe in the loosest sense of the term. Even so, that can hardly be considered to be the archetypical zombie, which is:

- Shambling.
- Killed by removing the head or destroying the brain.

[Spekio]

Zombies are a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine, but I stick to movies for them. I was going to read some Max Brooks stuff, but then internet fucktards turned me off them completely after they started wanking on about the ZOMBIE SCIENCE in his books and how they are VERY PLAUSIBLE.

Oh, it's totally written tongue in cheek. Forget the internet and give it a try.

[Stravo]

There are some good zombie anthologies out there. I have one I believe is called Day of the Dead or something like that. Generally well written short little stories that either play with the concept of the zombie apocalypse or just how we interact with zombies in general. One of the more interesting takes was a short story that dealt with zombies as they had been portrayed before Night of the Living Dead - as essentially mindless slaves. What would a mass zombie population do to the living work force? Hint - you don't have to pay them, set hours, or worry about hazardous duty. It's a really cool concept and couple that with zombie sex workers and you have one helluva good yarn. I'll check on the title of the anthology when I get home.

[NecronLord]

There is a preview-PDF for Cadian Blood available on the Black Library website.

I don't know if it contains any major spoilers etc., since i have (at the date of writing this post) neither read the preview nor the actual book - just posting it in case anyone is interested.

Well, I've finished it off. The zombies continue to prove exactly as you'd expect them to. Decent book, all in all, though.
Spoiler

Typhus is very well done. "Kill them and bring me their skulls. I require new pots for the lowliest of my slaves to piss in."

[NecronLord]

and couple that with zombie sex workers and you have one helluva good yarn.

Did someone say Zombie prostitutes?

[KrauserKrauser]

I'm definitely not very picky when it comes to my zombie fiction but I quite liked Day by Day Armageddon and look forward to its sequel when and if it ever gets published.

[Sriad]

One of the best Zombie works out there is the comic series The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman. The comic primarily follows Rick Grimes, a small-town cop who was comatose when the Zompocalyse hit, the group of survivors he finds after awaking, and his family. The survivors are well developed characters, and the number of close calls vs. actual deaths is just about perfectly balanced to maximize tension.

Their personalities are realized well enough that the series gets a lot of its narrative power from the emotional and cognitive changes brought by surviving the end of the world, which is critical to any really good zombie story.

I haven't read The Dead, but Samurai Cat has been one of my favorite parody series since I learned about it in 7th grade.

[Rye]

You mean people?

No, I mean zombies. You can cut their heads right off and they still keep coming after you, they never run out of energy, and they tend to be quite a bit stronger than the average person.

Since when do zombies still persist after the head is destroyed.

Since Return of the Living Dead at least.

As for zombie books... I personally find that pacing in novels doesn't work too well for the zombie concept, but that's just me. I've never read anything where they worked too well, though perhaps The Stand could've done it if King had opted for the walking dead instead of "dark Christianity".

[Gil Hamilton]

Zombies are a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine, but I stick to movies for them. I was going to read some Max Brooks stuff, but then internet fucktards turned me off them completely after they started wanking on about the ZOMBIE SCIENCE in his books and how they are VERY PLAUSIBLE.

Don't be turned off by the fucktards. "World War Z" is a very good book. In fact, it keeps hitting again and again on the point that zombies (at least his zombies) don't remotely make any scientific sense whatsoever. Several characters in the book comment about how impossible zombies should be by known science; for example, the diver who is utterly perplexed about how zombies can survive extended periods at the bottom of the ocean and be completely fine, even though salt water is ridiculously corrosive and should have destroyed them in reasonably short order.

In other words, Max Brooks deliberately lets science go with a kiss and a wave when it comes to zombies.

[Ugolino]

http://www.storyhack.com/oasis/

Not a novel as such, but a pretty good, free piece. I liked it when I first found it a while back.

And yes, World War Z is a good read.