When Susan and Vince attend their friend’s lavish wedding on a remote island near Savannah, Georgia, the couple has no idea they will be fighting to escape from a zombie attack, signaling the threat of an imminent zombie apocalypse in the United States. Soon after, Susan’s world is turned upside down. She tries to move on with her life in Santa Fe, New Mexico, only to find out months later that she is pregnant. The bittersweet news is supposed to be a blessing, but quickly turns into a nightmare when she discovers that her baby boy was born a zombie. And that’s not all. Susan also starts to show signs that she may be infected with the virus. Her implausible secrets become difficult to hide, especially with the CDC and Homeland Security monitoring her everyday life. As Susan struggles to survive, she finds creative ways of keeping her Zombie Baby nourished, and as a Zombie Mom, she goes to great lengths to protect her child.
This was a weird overall tale that does have its moments. One of the better features here is the rather emotional and generally gripping second half that comes about with the increasing activity trying to bring a new series of members into the zombie army. As everything comes together incredibly well with the build-up beforehand featuring the amount of depth in their relationship so that we can get a sense of just how much motherly devotion and love she has for her newborn baby, the gradual evolution that she’s able to not only change her appearance at will but also communicate with other zombies to get them under her control so that she can unleash an army to protect her son is quite fun. The frenetic action, graphic gore, and emotional resonance of what’s on display here are handled quite well as it leans into this aspect of the zombie canon.
That said, there are some problems with the story. The main factor here is the seemingly jumbled and scattershot story, where it seems incredulous to believe that a virus of this scale and magnitude will be allowed this much leniency and lackadaisical government oversight depicted here. The multiple depictions of the couple’s escape from the zombie-crashed wedding they were attending turn out to be a decent enough starting point, but the way the story is handled after that is hard to believe. As it’s determined that various branches of the government are aware of everything happening, not just with this location, but we’re told of other encounters with the zombie virus along other points of the coastal portion of the country, it doesn’t serve any logical reasoning for their hands-off approach to the wife.
Knowing how close she was in proximity to the husband before the incident on the plane ride home, how quickly he turned, and what happened with him once that happened, to see them be more concerned with months-long surveillance, more than any kind of quarantine or more intense forms of scrutiny, feels incredibly unlikely to see play out. As this becomes more pronounced the longer it goes, with how much monitoring the government is doing versus what should be done with the situation, the story as a whole starts somewhat clunky, and although it does get fixed during the book, there’s still that starting point to get through. Also challenging to navigate is the clunky writing style, with awkward dialogue that reveals exposition or conversations that lack realistic beats, making for a somewhat difficult read.
3/5
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