"Excellent zombie fiction"
I can't believe this hasn't been reviewed yet. It should be a lot more popular, and I'm determined to make it so!
Living With the Dead takes the format of a blog slightly prior to and during the zombie apocalypse. Interspersed occasionally with the viewpoints of other primary characters, the blog is primarily from the viewpoint of one main protagonist.
This is truly a book for the zombie nerd. The earlier parts of the blog go in to how to prepare your house, what supplies are needed / used, recommended courses of action... I think I have bookmarked the lot for personal reference!
I have read a lot of zombie fiction, from the classics (World War Z) to the smaller publishing houses (Plague of the Dead: The Morningstar Strain) and similar multi-media format books, and, of course The Walking Dead Compendium Volume 1. Living with the Dead is similar in ways to all of these, and yet stands on its own. At times admittedly quite boring in its content, given a lot of the followers of the genre are after gruesome and gritty encounters with the living dead, LwD delves heavily in to the impact the end of the world has on humanity. But, unlike World War Z, it focuses on one cluster of survivors and their bid to build a static, stable new community in Kentucky.
The characters are raw and real, and the story eminently readable for all the right reasons - you want them to survive, to grow. You don't want the people to have conflicts (but they do) and they don't always win against the bad guys either, which Guess' post-apocalypse USA has in spades. There may not be as much zombie action compared to some of the bigger titles out there, but this independant work lays out the souls of those who survive the first waves, and you are carried along for one hell of a ride.
Looking very much forward to reading the rest of this series, and hopefully the more books planned for the future.