Despite the fact that novels about vampires and zombies are both about death and undeath, they approach mortality and immortality in very different ways. Novels about zombies have different kinds of horrors and fears, and explore different physical, spiritual, psychological and emotional states. There is nothing remotely sexy and seductive about obviously decaying corpses stumbling mindlessly about driven by an implacable desire to rip, rend and tear living human flesh with filthy fingernails and blunt human teeth teeming with zombie plague bacteria with one purpose only - to spread the disease.
A biological apocalypse brought about by an outbreak of zombies raises issues of sheer survival. What happens if civilization as we know it breaks down suddenly, quickly, violently, and irrevocably? Who will survive? How? Why? For how long? What qualities does it take for people to survive such an event? What sorts of leaders and followers will emerge? When the old order breaks down, what sort of new order will rise to takes it's place? What can we believe in - government? religion? science? Who can we place our trust in when anyone might become infected, and new enemies might arise at any time, and from familiar faces? When the body arises from the dead, what survives, if anything of the person or spirit or spark which once inhabited and animated that body? Is there anything at all after the death of the body? Are we any more or less than hunks of blood and flesh and brain synapses firing?
These were some of the issues raised while I read this novel. I thought it was well written and entertaining, and definitely disturbing.
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