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Reign of the Dead by Len Barnhart
When Jim Workman returns from his isolated cabin after a three-week vacation everything has gone to hell. A mysterious virus has caused the dead to rise and begin snacking on the living. Quickly Jim meets up with a group of survivors and falls into the daily routine of trying to survive in a world that has gone mad. There he also meets up with a woman that he falls in love with, and meets a scientist named Susan that claims she may be able to figure out a cure for the virus. That is with the right equipment and time, which they don’t have.
At the same time that Jim is meeting up with the
survivors a reverend by the name of Peterson is trying to make sense of
a world seemingly abandoned by God. When he is eventually forced to
flee his refuge in the church it strikes him that God must be punishing
them all. Of course that is everyone but him, so after finding a group
of followers he can manipulate he starts his crusade to start society
over the way that God would want it to be.
Of course the two groups eventually clash and
many bad things happen. Most of them are zombie related. Who lives
and who dies? Is there a cure to be had? Will the crazy reverend get
what is coming to him? Read the book and find out damn it!
Every time I pick up a zombie themed book or pop
in a zombie movie I’m looking for another experience like I had the
first time I saw Night of the Living Dead. Most of the time I’m
disappointed. In the case of most of the books the author has tried to
tinker with the undead, or make some large supernatural force behind
the outbreak. I guess that is okay for some, but those stories don’t
interest me. What I find interesting about zombie stories (movies or
books) are the sorts of things that Romero dealt with in his movies.
The survivors and how they interact with each other is what drives the
narrative. I think the reason that I enjoyed this book so much is that
Barnhart spends his time focusing on the survivors. The early part of
the book is split into sections and explains how each of the main
characters has survived to the point that they all meet up. By the
time they all are together their interactions make sense and their
motivations are understandable.
So the main characters are well developed. Why
does that make for a good piece of zombie fiction? Well let me explain
myself. First of all the tension and actual fear for the characters
comes not from the zombies themselves, but the readers fear for these
characters. The same can be said for why I found myself smiling when
the good reverend gets what is coming to him in the end of the book.
Second this is a zombie story, so Barnhart is going to have to kill off
a lot of minor characters. It isn’t possible for him to establish all
of these characters with back-stories, so what he does is show their
deaths thru the eyes of the characters we are invested in. We may not
care that X dies, but we will care how it affects say Jim or Susan.
This is a great book that will grab the reader
and keep them interested until the very end. The characters are well
developed and realistic, which makes what happens to many of them so
disturbing. It is an amazing to me that this is Barnhart’s first book
and glad that I have at least 2 more to read. I highly recommend it.
Rating - ****
- John “El Juan” Shatzer
