Stars: 3 out of 5.
I am honestly amazed at the amount of 5 star reviews for this book. Did I read a different book from everyone else?
I mean, yeah, it starts great if a bit slow, introducing us to the two main narrators and showing us what brought them to Amsterdam before the fateful emergency podcast. Problem is, the rest of the book is like watching a train wreck in Zack Snider slow motion with heavy dose of flashbacks and exposition inserted between all the action. Which, you guessed it, kills any type of tension or momentum of the story. It doesn’t help that the two narrators relate that story after they had already survived the events, so there is really no need to worry about them not making it.
I mean, you have a scene where a guy is literally about to get tackled by zombies, and he is running for the door to a building… but our protagonists realize that if they open that door to save him, all the zombies will get into the building as well, so not only he would be dead, but all of them would as well. Tense moment, right? Life or death stakes, right? Why oh why do we have to read through 4 pages of those characters reminiscing about their guilty feelings and PTSD about that episode WHILE that episode is unfolding? No more tension. And my interest in the story is as dead and mangled as the body of that guy once he is savaged by the zombie horde.
And the whole book is like that. I don’t mind the inner monolog and some explanations of the character’s feelings, or a couple flashbacks here and there, but not when it bogs down the story and kills the flow of it. I ended up skimming the last fifty pages of the book ignoring all of the “feelings” just to see what happened. And it was nothing much.
It’s better written then some zombie books I read, but definitely not a 5 stars or even 4 starts read.