Introduction

It's getting harder to find a fresh and innovative story within the Zombie niche of the horror genre. Most of the scope for storylines has been (pun alert - you have been warned!) done to death and badly needs resurrecting. Will Dead City give new life to dieing genre or does it require, like all annoying zombies, a bullet to the brain to release us from the misery of reading it?

The Book

Eddie Hudson is a police officer in San Antonio and is the main character. The book is written in the first person from his perspective. Whilst on duty one night, he is called out to respond to some men who are fighting and look intoxicated. The background to all this is a series of hurricanes which have battered Texas over the last few weeks, and there are confusing reports from other Texan cities like Houston that people are being mindlessly attacked by others and some are even being eaten.

He drives to the scene of the intoxicated brawlers and discovers six people who don't respond when he orders them to back away from him. Being an American, he only briefly uses Mace and instead goes straight for the shotgun (remember all they have done at this point is ignored him) but the gun has no effect so he realises that something is badly amiss. He manages to get away from the advancing crowd and it dawns on him that he has been faced with a zombie outbreak. As he travels round San Antonio to both find help and get to his wife and child, the zombies seem to get bigger in number and harder to kill with a dwindling amount of ammunition for his gun. Will he survive and manage to find his wife and child, will they be ok or are they too zombies? You'll have to find out how it ends yourself!

Opinion

All the way through the 288 pages I was waiting for a brilliant twist or an unexpected change in the plot's direction - it didn't come and I was left feeling very disappointed and even angry at the end of the book. The storyline only focuses on his journey around the city overnight to find his wife and is about as surprising as opening your door on Halloween to find a group of six year olds stood there expecting sweets. In fact, the book's predicatbility has annoyed me so much that I'm tempted to spoil the plot's (the word plot is very loosely applied here) ending and reveal what happens, but if I had to suffer, then someone else should too.

Man runs away from zombies, enters a building, finds more zombies, runs away, enters a building, finds more zombies and so on and so on. There, sod it, you can count that as a spoiler I suppose as there isn't anything else of much significance to tell you about.

Very rarely for me, I'm going to award just the one star for this book as to give it any more wouldn't be fair to people who are expecting a good read. As for a recommendation, if you have a wonky kitchen table that needs a leg propping up then this rather slimline paperback would probably fit the bill. I could also recommend this book to people who are in a real zombie outbreak - you won't get any useful survival tips from it but it would be useful to throw at a chasing zombie when you run out of bullets.