The blurb for Do Not Enter compares it to Max Brooks' World War Z, but other than the fact that these are both (more or less) epistolary stories and concern zombies, they really have very little in common and it seems like a poor comparison to make because it seems inevitable that Do Not Enter can only come off the loser in that relationship.

Do Not Enter is a mixed media project and has more in common with the other work referenced in the blurb, PostSecret. The premise is that a flu pandemic mutated (as they do) and created zombies. The 'letters' depicted in Do Not Enter's pages are brief, random snapshots of largely unnamed unknowns collected by a further unknown.

This has the potential to be a very interesting conceit. The letters are, by necessity, so brief and so varied in the information they give or don't give that it's almost a Rorschach Test. It's possible to envision any prequel or ending to the flash-bulb illuminated moment represented by the note and, though—by necessity—there's a lot of sadness, melancholy and loss inherent in any apocalyptic event (like a zombie outbreak), there are seeds of hope, as well, that can flower and root in the story's interstices and it's unknown future. I feel like (assuming you enjoy zombie books in the first place) you can take almost anything you want to away from the book.

And, in a forum more like PostSecret or, more specifically, the book's progenitor, www.lostzombies.com, I imagine it's a concept that works better. But as a book—a pseudo novel—it fails on a couple fronts.

Going back to the comparison to World War Z, the place that WWZ succeeds is that, though it's similarly an epistolary type story that is formed from many collected viewpoints, it takes place in a period of time after the outbreak, when the newly reformed society has had a chance to take stock of events and place them in some kind of context. As well, Brooks, through the auspices of WWZ's narrator/interviewer, acts as a kind of curator of information, selecting those accounts that will be most illuminating and showcasing them to draw a narrative through-line. In short, WWZ is actually a story.

Whereas, Do Not Enter is, both textually and meta-textually, a completely random collection of "found" media, collected without context or any overarching choice about what kind of story it would all tell. There's definitely a superficial kind of chronology to the letters, the earliest from the pandemic period into when the first zombies begin to appear and the latest an unknown period into the outbreak itself, but there's no real through-line, no overreaching perspective in the choice of letters presented. The letters are supposed to be randomly collected and they feel random, which makes them interesting…but not as effective, especially from an emotional point of view. While it's natural for the letters' authors to lack a grasp of the bigger picture, given their circumstances and the briefness of the notes, it's a narrative failure for the reader to similarly lack even a sense of the overall narrative.

The secondary—and less important—flaw of Do Not Enter is encoded in the very format of an epistolary novel, which is the dissemination of information. Epistolary novels contain artificiality in that the information offered by the unseen letter writer is often/usually greater than what would be written in an actual letter. There's a lot of, "As you know, Bob…" that we, as readers, accept as necessary for the story to work. And, for their part, the author has a fine line to walk to keep that suspension of disbelief…suspended. There's a few times Do Not Enter fails to maintain it's own artificiality, specifically with the letters from the post-quarantine period that reference events in the UK. After asking readers to swallow the 'big' idea of a pandemic zombie outbreak in the first place, it becomes really critical to maintain in the smaller details, which Do Not Enter doesn't quite manage.

So, as a coffee table type book, something more in the vein of PostSecrets, Do Not Enter is an interesting idea and an interesting presentation. As an alternate form of story-telling, however, it really fails and somewhat disappointingly. I'm fascinated by the idea of it as a web site RP/social networking experience and that seems like a pretty genius idea, as well as the perfect forum for zombie aficionados like me; I just wish the book had lived up to the allure of the idea.