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A Novel by TW Brown

Reviewed by Sam Christopher

Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars

Samuel Todd has problems. He’s a divorced father of a teenager, he sings for very little money in a band that basically does frat parties and such, and his main job is as a paper delivery guy. Oh, and he lives in a world overrun by walking dead people whose sole aim is to eat anything or anyone living. And he writes about it, first on the Web, later in a notebook he keeps constantly at his side. This is the setup for this excellent novel by TW Brown. It appears to be self-published, as Mr. Brown appears to be the sole proprietor of May-December Publications. This makes it the best self-published book I’ve read to date.

Reminiscent of Z Day is Here, this tale follows our protagonist through all sorts of travails and troubles. First, of course, he has to figure out what’s going on and then get himself to believe it. This is always, for me, the most important part of any story that shows the beginning of the “zombie plague”. It would be a difficult thing to swallow but at some point even the most hardened skeptic has to buy into it—hopefully before their disbelief gets them killed. And that would make for a short story. That’s what makes this the single toughest thing in a story like this: the reader has to see the narrator’s point of view on this changing and it has to be a natural thing, a logical consequence of the action the narrator is observing or experiencing. If it doesn’t have the right feel to it the reader just shuts it off and disbelieves virtually everything after it. Or at least I do. After Todd believes in the problem and understands the meager remedies at his disposal, the story moves on to one of pure survival, as Todd moves from place to place, from group of survivors to group of survivors, completely at the whim and mercy of both the undead and the one thing that may be worse: the living who are dead inside.

There are two things here that make this a superior work in this genre. The first is the most obvious. Brown is simply a very good writer. His plot choices are generally very good and logical, with events in the story nearly always flowing organically from what has preceded without being too obvious. Even his pseudo-Hitchcockian twist in the story (which I won’t give away here) worked well, even though I wanted to hate it. His characterizations and personality mix is likewise interesting and well-done. The second thing is that he takes a premise from Romero, that premise being that the walking dead are a problem but it’s the people still living who have allowed the situation to reveal the worst of their inner selves who are most to be feared, and ramps it up to a whole ‘nother level. The people around our hero here are generally all right but it seems that nearly everyone else in the world… wow, these are the people who got superpowers in The End League. Bad, just rotten to the core.

Luckily for readers of dark sf, the same can’t be said about this book.

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