Just finished Bowie Valeriano Ibarra’s THE FALL OF AUSTIN, the third installment in his DOWN THE ROAD series, coming out from Permuted Press in 2011. Probably the best zombie book I read in the past year. The focus is on the outbreak, and it’s entirely believable. The writing is tight, crisp, edgy. The action is non-stop. The setting and characters are richly drawn. The conflict is in your face. Highly recommended.

David Moody’s AUTUMN offers a fresh, powerfully realistic approach to the zombie genre with his unique voice that has made him, in my opinion, the George Romero of zombie fiction. In AUTUMN, the shell-shocked survivors of a sudden worldwide plague struggle to overcome their daze and find a way to avoid the living dead that are soon everywhere, attracted to sound, and violent. There is surprisingly little violence and gore and the characters often seem stunned by indecision at times, behaving exactly how real people would to such an impossible crisis, and setting up cathartic bursts of action that frequently had me on edge.

Moody’s vision of the apocalypse is dark, gritty, realistic, dirty, almost hopeless and entirely original. The zombies are utterly repulsive, almost rotting right off the page, and frightening due to their unpredictability. The result is an entirely different kind of zombie story that is unusually gripping.

Click here to learn more about the AUTUMN series by David Moody.