Perhaps the worst book I've ever bothered to finish. I read that the author was rejected by tons of publishers before deciding to self-publish, but one wonders whether the radical notion of, say, writing a second draft even entered his mind during this process.

Blank dialogue, hateful pseudo-"everyman" mannequins (none of whom think, talk or behave like an actual human being) as protagonists, vague and dull locations, endless, irrelevant conversations and the most embarrassingly immature romance I've yet encountered in print all distract from a sub-par cookie-cutter zombie story. The plot's main innovation is that the undead aren't even interested in killing the living for half the novel, instead deciding to attack the novel's sorely missed dramatic tension.

Another reviewer bemoaned the endless hyperbole - completely agree. Once you've heard the fiftieth description of how the last few days have been the most horrific John Smith has ever witnessed, how the endless off-camera horrors have reduced Sarah Evans to a gibbering wreck etc it begins to lose any meaning and only serves to pad the already flabby, tortured prose. The book frequently repeats or paraphrases earlier descriptions, and a number of times I was surprised by the choice of words which really made no sense in the context used - if ever a book needed an editor...

The author also bravely eschews the 'Show, don't tell' maxim, often to dazzling effect. The novel's unimaginably navel-gazing third act, where the protagonists stop moving and simply recount their entire tedious back-stories to one another, was quite spectacularly bad. Quite the framing technique there...

The whole thing reads like typical teenage fanfic. Disjointed, boring, anticlimactic and completely unenjoyable. Glad I didn't buy the rest of the series.