REVIEW: Zombie Apocalypse - Stephen Jones

• Year first released:  2010
• ISBN of the edition I read:  9780762440016
• Publisher of the edition I read:  Running Press Book Publishers
• My rating (out of 5):  2.5

To be clear, I definitely picked up Zombie Apocalypse as a guilty pleasure. No expectations to speak of - just some zombie fun. The first hundred or so pages had me a bit fooled, though, into thinking this could actually be better than I had suspected.

Turns out I got a little ahead of myself by thinking this, of course - but who's surprised?

Apocalypse is, technically, a book of short stories, all by different authors. However, the creator, Stephen Jones, did a surprisingly good job of making the stories connect. They all - or most of them, at least - work together to tell different angles of, essentially, the same story: a government project in London ignores the proper protocol and digs up a centuries-old graveyard, unleashing an evolved version of the Black Plague...

etc. etc. etc.

Most of the stories aren't expressed as straightforward narratives - instead we have government memorandums, research notes, email and Tweet exchanges, diary notes, etc. - a great presentation for this sort of overarching plot.

The first several stories interlace like puzzle pieces, setting the book off on a great, disturbing note. Settings are repeated, characters reappear, the unfolding is elaborate and precise.

If the entire book had kept up this momentum, it actually could have been one of the better zombie books about there.* It doesn't take long for Apocalypse to lose its way, though. Starting somewhere around the first Tweet-exchange story ("Tweets of the Dead" by Jay Russell), the focus of the book gets more shifty and less defined. (In fact, specifically, "Tweets of the Dead" is one of the least interesting and least well-written of the collection.) From there, the stories get to be more hit-and-miss.

There are several missed opportunities here and there throughout - many of the stories seem to allude to larger things to come...which don't (at least not in any sort of meaningful, worthwhile way).

I briefly mentioned the overall story - London, graveyard, plague, blah blah blah - but, unfortunately, this actually only describes the first three quarters of the book. Up to that point, it's entirely centered around the events of London. And then, inexplicably, we have a story in Australia ("Wasting Matilda"). Why? - because...well, it's hard to say. Perhaps Robert Hood didn't get the memo that the stories were supposed to connect? Not really sure.

In fact, from this point on, the stories erratically and disjointedly jump around the world, only finally returning to England for the final, anticlimactic, terrible final story/speech.

The first half of the book is actually generally fun and worthwhile - if you're comfortable setting it aside before things derail. Majorly derail. The graphic design of the book alone makes it worth spending at least a bit of time with, and at least the first few stories are genuinely interesting for the genre. I only wish Jones hadn't let the latter half of the book slip through the cracks so badly.



*Actually, I guess, this is still one of the best zombie books out there - but that says more about other zombie books on the market than it says about this one.