Book Review: As the World Dies: The First Days
February 6th, 2010 CommentsCategories: Book Reviews, Reviews, Sam Christopher
The first book in a Zombie Trilogy written by Rhiannon Frater
Reviewed by Sam Christopher
Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars
Let me say for the record here that I’m not a fan of running zombies. I’m not saying there can’t be any interesting story that employs them, just that I see no way for anyone to ever get away if there are sprinting creatures who never get tired chasing them. Even if the protagonists are in a car, it always seemed to me that at least one zombie would see them and give chase, and even when they lost him another would almost inevitably pick up the trail, and so on and so forth until they ran out of gas. And on foot… forget it. How do you outrun something that never slows down? Hell, in most horror films people can’t even outrun the knife-wielding maniac who isn’t running, even when the prey is in a car!
Funny thing in this book is that none of the characters in it are fans of the “running dead” either. There are constant references to Romero’s work by characters here, with it being mentioned several times that the zombies of this novel aren’t “following the rules”. Two characters in particular, Jenni, who’s seen every zombie movie with her abusive husband—who was even so probably a real sweetheart before as compared to the last time she sees him here—and Juan, a guy described as having a “zombie handbook”, are driven almost to distraction by what they perceive as breaches in conduct on the part of the reanimated dead. And while I can see someone saying that’s not a very realistic reaction to the situation, my only defense of it would be that people in fantastic situations often come up with fantastic methods of coping. The author’s note at the beginning of the novel reminds us that this is a story of a zombie apocalypse set in Texas, and that she’d always been told to write about what you know and love. “Well,” she says, “I know Texans and I love the zombie genre.” I can’t argue with that.
The story begins with Jenni hiding out on her front porch from her hungry family. Just as she’s about to give up hope—they have found her and are working hard to get to her—Katie pulls up in a pickup truck. Katie, we’ll soon learn, is a district attorney who inherited the truck from a man murdered while trying to help her, and this after Katie had been attacked by the love of her life, Lydia. The two women go on the run, trying to get away from population centers while also dealing with the situation they find themselves in. Along the way they meet up with an older couple who live in the back of their hunting store (which is a very good profession to be in if zombies attack, I would think) before eventually rescuing one of Jenni’s other children, Jason, who had been camping when all the stuff started, and finding a town of survivors who have built walls to keep out the dead.
As with all the best sf tales, this one is all about how this situation affects the people involved, with Frater doing a masterful job of making us care about these very real characters. She tells us it began as a short story on the web that she came to realize could be expanded into a much longer tale. We can only be happy she made the effort.
See also Sam Christopher’s review of Brian Keene’s Zombie novel The Rising
Buy all three books in the As the World Dies trilogy from Amazon.com:












