Crawl on me. Sink into me. Die for me. Living dead girl.

First of all, this cover is great. But the content inside is kinda… prosaic? It’s a simple read. There’s nothing flowery or striking about the prose. It’s just pretty much a straight urban fantasy with not a whole lot of plot or high stakes. There’s no build-up to something. It’s more slice of life. Writing for the masses. For entertainment.

The concept is really really close to iZombie, even though this came years before that. They’re both undead people (but not quite undead, they just have 10 bpm heart rates), both eat brains (as opposed to flesh), both work in a morgue, both eat the brains they get from the morgue, both help the cops solve murders, if you don’t eat brains quick enough you become the rotting mindless kind of zombie, both have an underground zombie society/black market. I wonder if Rob Thomas gleaned more from this than from the comic book of the same name.

My problem is the white trash part of her life and the zombie part of her life never mix together to create a synergistic plot. There are scenes dedicated to her alcoholic father, run-down house, drug habit, etc. And there are scenes where she’s working as a morgue technician. And the two never see each other. It’s like two separate stories are going on just to justify the title/hook. Zombie-ness/undeadness doesn’t factor into her life. She hides it too well and it’s never an obstacle. So I enjoyed this for what it is, but I’m not interested enough to read the sequels.