Didn't pick up that the third and final volume of Lisa Richardson's trilogy came out earlier this year until about a week ago.
This volume is shorter than its predecessors running in at just under 200 pages. Again my interest in buying this was more for reference to any locations in my home town than the now somewhat tired zombie genre. But again it was a good read, despite there being not a lot of reference to my home town locations and that I had second guessed the ending very early on.
Ok, it's never going to pull the punch that a classic like Matheson's 'I Am Legend' is but it is an easy to read zombie action novel that will take two to three days to race through. The fast paced first person narrative is a page turner and this time I didn't feel quite so anaesthetised to the killing of the zombie antagonists. The zombie-fatigue that kicked in quite early on previous volumes barely surfaced, as this story, I felt, had more depth to the characters and benefited from more changes in location. Yes the killing of zombies against overwhelming odds without breaking too much of a sweat did seem too easy and a little unrealistic at times, and would have been more suited to a Marvel superhero film - but then in reading such a book one has to suspend an awful lot more disbelief to even enter into a world in which a zombie apocalypse would happen, and Lisa has carried this off well with attention to detail on the smaller everyday things that build up the layers of her fictional universe. Being English the social references to culture as well as geography were appreciated in that they added further dimension to the world but I'm sure not so intrusive as to put off non-British people from enjoying the novel even if they don't get all the references. The language used by the protagonists was very believable and rooted in the present with current slang and the awful chavvy idiosyncrasies of youth present. It will be interesting for someone in twenty or thirty years time to read this book - and would they comment "did people really talk like that back then!" That is if proper language hasn't disintegrated beyond all recognition by then!
So al in all worth a read.
Friday 12th June 2015
