Apocalypse of the Dead

Apocalypse of The Dead is the second book in Joe McKinney's "Dead World" series. It was nominated for Bram Stoker Award in 2010 for best novel. It has been two years since the events of his first novel in the series, Dead City, and the government's answer to the problems of the "zombies" is to wall off the entire infected area, and killing anything that tries to leave the quarantine zone. Unfortunately, this includes uninfected who were unable to get out of the city. Naturally this is not going to solve the problem. The virus escapes and spreads like wildfire throughout the US, and because we now live in a global society, the entire world.

The story is broken up into the survival stories of various individuals, who all end up in the same place, "Grasslands, South Dakota." This is a supposed safe haven set up by an enigmatic preacher named, Jim Jones, Jasper. I guess we can all see where this will be going.

And here in lies my major problem with this story. If Mr. McKinney wanted to write a novel about Jonestown, he should have. Instead he left us with this. I guess I am just getting a case of Zombie overload. I'm tired of novels full of various random survivors thrown together by circumstance, and to be honest the search for the cure aspect that had potential was not well developed. So even though this novel was well written, and many of the characters were interesting and fully realized, it just felt like I had seen it before.

I will be reading the third novel in the series Flesh Eaters, but after that I think I need to give the zombies a bit of a rest.