**PLEASE BE AWAREbr/This eBook collects the first two Living With the Dead eBooks into one. This work contains. "LWtD: With Spring Comes The Fall" and "LWtD: The Bitter Seasons" as well as a large amount of bonus content.
Living With the Dead is a serialized story of everyday life at the beginning of and during the zombie apocalypse. Its original format was and is an almost daily blog.
Told in the author's own voice, LWtD is the story of a group of survivors in central Kentucky, working to stay alive amid the violence and chaos of a crumbling civilization. Faced with threats and challenges that tax their endurance and force them to make terrible choices, the story follows the survivors day to day.
From the viewpoint of one man and his friends, the answer to the question of what people will become when the rules no longer apply begins to emerge. For some, it is violent conflict. br/br/For others who only want to live in peace, this is a journey toward understanding that in a world of the dead, the only choice is to truly live.
Joshua Guess (who goes by Josh most of the time, but Joshua professionally because his mom insists) is originally from southern Illinois, but moved to central Kentucky at an early age. Always a storyteller, his interest in creating began with art. He loved to draw and come up with stories about his pictures. Then he discovered comic books and novels, and things...took a turn. Devouring everything from superboy to Stephen King, Josh started to gain a greater interest in writing, making it a hobby during high school and achieving distinguished marks in his portfolio. Then, life got in the way. College and the struggle to start a life of his own away from home took up most of his time. His love of telling stories took a back seat to the needs of daily life for many years, with the occasional foray into working on one project or another. In late 2009, Josh buckled down and started work on an idea for a fantasy novel that had been stuck in his head since those halcyon days back in high school. Struggling to find a voice, Josh realized months later after many false starts that he needed to stretch his brain a little, strengthen his writing muscles. So he began another project that had been simmering in the back of his mind, a continuing serialized zombie story, told in the form of a daily blog. Living With the Dead has given him a measure of success, but more important has imparted new skills at wordsmithing and the drive to complete. 'Bound to Silence', his debut novel, has been released and is available now, as are many collections and versions of Living With the Dead. Once that tipping point was reached, there was no choice for him but to keep on writing. Much more of Josh's work will be released in the coming months.
I hate writing in the third person about myself. I live an average life and work a full time job. I have three cats, two dogs, two ferrets, and a wife that I'm so in love with it hurts. My goal is to some day have enough success to write full time, and to manage a level of long term financial security that I don't have to worry about money. It's my dream to make a good living doing what I love--telling stories. I hope you enjoy my work. That's why I do it.
My favourite part about this book is the main characters prospective and obtaining items to survive, anything from food to planks of wood and metal to reinforce their home. And zombie activity, yes! I like how simple and state forward in its writing and I like the blog style from a guy named Josh.
The book focuses on a community of survivors and how they work together, and their struggles. The endeavors in this book is between the zombies takeover and the survival group stressing at each other, and arguing who will lead the team. And the consent threat with those humans on the outside that they come in contact with. It is a brutal picture of what lies at the heart of humanity which fascinates me. The difficult decisions and then seeing those decisions either fail or work, and when they backfired it changes what you believe to be true of the world.
Josh is your average Sci-Fi, video games nerd that I identified with. The author really makes you care about what's going on and the people involved, and although you may think you know what's coming up, you have no idea. I like the unknown aspect and wanting your favourite characters to survive and do well.
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.
I was hooked after the first two pages. I got the Kindle version of Year One, which is the first two books combined. I'm amazed at how Guess sucked me in and made me care, even though I knew it was fiction. He delves into the more human aspects of dealing with the zombie apocalypse -- loss, grief, friendship, pride, and the importance of survival. It is in blog format, but we hear from several different characters, each with his or her own unique perspective.
If you're looking for a gory story with violence just for entertainment's sake, you won't find it here. Sure, there are descriptions of death and violence, but it's about so much more. It's about rebuilding society when everything has been lost. It's about reconnecting with others and ensuring the survival of the human race.