THE DEAD TIMES

RATING:

ZOMBIE RATING:

DESCRIPTION:

Out of nowhere, Zombies appear - the Earth has spat out its dead. Civilization crumbles as the world is plunged into an undead nightmare. People flee, fight, beg, steal, kill - do whatever they have to in order to survive. One family, the Stillengers, tries their best to navigate the hostile, Zombie-filled landscape, attempting to find lasting sanctuary. Another, is caught unprepared by the agonisingly quick rise, forcing "Doc", a surgeon and the father of the family, to dash home in a bid to save his wife and children. Both groups will learn that the living dead are not the only enemy out in this new world and that the mental toll of living in a world overrun by dead can be a much greater threat than physical injury.

MY VERDICT:

This is overall a decent read with average story and well-developed characters but it fails to have much of a direction or unique-draw, over-complicating it's quite simple 'a Zombie outbreak happens, run away' plot with unnecessary extras. Wither is divided into two separate stories, each dealing with the struggles of a different family through a Zombie outbreak, before eventually merging the two 'halves' into one. It's not an uncommon approach and, when you do eventually get to the end (and this takes a very long time thanks to over 600 pages of text), the ending has more climatic tension - knowing the backstory to both sides of the event. However, I really don't think splitting the overall narrative this way is a wise decision; it just makes the book overly long and confusing; am I reading about this character now or this character, what happened to these characters as I was just reading about them before the narrative suddenly shifted to these characters? A slightly unusual point related to this confusion is that events seem to happen to the family you are not reading about while you are reading about the other family. It is hard to explain but after reading a chapter focusing on the second family, the next chapter sees a member of the first family unexplainably bitten. It even happens between chapters focusing on one family without a gap in-between - they end a chapter in a newly found car but start the very next chapter on foot, no mention of the car breaking-down or being abandoned. Also, a major let down for this Zombie-story is just how quickly it forgets about the Zombies. After the first few chapters, the roving deadheads are merely referenced in passing by vague mentions of groups in the distance or approaching hordes. There is just very little description of the Zombies or of violent attacks, instead focusing on desolate cityscapes, family drama and human oppressors.