Zombie Apocalypse! (Mammoth Books) [Paperback]

`Zombie Apocalypse' (aka Mammoth book of Zombie Apocalypse) is a collection of articles, various media transcripts, text messages, tweets, diaries and more, describing the events around a Zombie plague that was released from the Black death burial ground at Blackheath.

The first two thirds of the book are reasonably good, with enough tension and stories of survival to keep most zombie lore fans satisfied, but sadly the last third loses it's way. It starts to recount survivors novel ideas, or youtube spoof song lyrics, or film pitches and I started to skip these parts. I wanted to read the so called `real' accounts of Zombie survival, not some lame attempts at Zombie fiction as recounted by characters in a book (I am aware of the irony of this considering the whole book is fiction, but you know what I mean). There is also no real coherent narrative to this book, it is just a series of personal experiences or accounts and nothing really ties it together to tell a coherent story from beginning to end. Some of the handwritten pages got tiresome to decipher and some other aspects weren't as clear as they could've been, but despite the changing styles of text this was easy enough to read.

If you are huge fan of Zombie books then this may be worth a try at some point, but if you are new to this genre then try `World War Z' by Max Brooks first which is a similar book (I.e. lots of anecdotal evidence of a Zombie outbreak), but which is more coherent and which was done a whole letter better than this.

Feel free to check out my blog which can be found on my profile page.

Made in much the same vein as the Morningstar series, or the epic World War Z; Zombie Apocalypse is presented as a series of reportage from various viewpoints centring at first from the site of All Hallow's Church in London and later to Australia then north and central America (though the book alludes to infections within Europe, they are not explored for some reason.) As explained on the book's blurb the entries come in the form of diaries, blog posts, letters and transcribed calls among other forms.

This approach, on the whole, works. Each individual segment has its own distinct voice, and there is some nice continuation within the pieces - particularly the diary of "Maddy". Unfortunately and as has been noted before this does sometimes give rise to an inconsistency of feel - some entries are bleak and absolutely dire while some others are absurd and too humorous to be in keeping with the overall tone. I would go so far as to say the final two entries were an insult to the rest of the book, and took an undeveloped idea (which I will not spoil for you) to a ridiculous extreme.

Considering the contributors involved with this piece are somewhat prolific in their field (Kim Newman, Michael Marshall-Smith, Christopher Fowler) I am surprised they aren't being given more prominence in the advertising of this novel - their pieces are both satirical and, in the case of MMS's piece in particular, quite touching; yet you would only know this was a compilation of different author's stories upon reading the last page of the book.

And therein, the compilation aspect, is actually where the largest disappointment lies. The premise of a New festival of Britain certainly doesn't seem far-fetched and the parodying aspects of the story are certainly cutting-edge (read this book in two years time and it won't seem anywhere near as fresh); however beyond the premise of the festival and into the actual method of infection the story goes from science fiction and into outright ridicule, in fact it feels that toward the end of the book the contributors were willing to pull out all sorts of incredible macguffins to justify their story arcs. Furthermore, there are times when it becomes clear the authors have strayed from their own narrative styles, for example allowing poetic flows to teenage children which simply don't tally with their earlier entries.

Overall, this is a good book for fans of the genre - it certainly won't disappoint on the whole. However, with a little more precision in the editing process, a reduction of about 10% would have been sufficient, this could have been a must-buy. For now I would have to rate it strictly a borrow-from-a-friend.

Having a number of different writers contribute to this book is a great concept, but however when all put together the book lacks direction and any central character's that the reader is looking for. Also changing a Zombie from a Flesh Eating machine into a thinking body just does not work as was a poor concept.