Okay, I like a good zombie book. Feed, by Mira Grant, totally started me on this zombie kick. I followed up reading that series with World War Z, the book is better than the movie. I watched the Walking Dead series, then started reading the graphic novels (and oh boy, there are a lot). I read the not-so-great-in-my-opinion Raising Stony Mayhall, and while I didn't like the book per se, I did like the way the zombie world was portrayed. I had a delightful zombie surprise in The Girl With All the Gifts, which just means I was lulled into thinking zombie books are good fun reading.
Which they are, for the most part.
This zombie book, however, rather broke that trend.
The book is supposed to be a journal of one guy who happens to be military personnel and a pilot, who manages to avoid the first wave of infection in the zombie apocalypse. He finds a companion, then a few more, and survives. The journey is reasonable (if you can accept the premise of "the dead rising up to continue walking and having the single-minded desire of canabalism"), but the writing is somewhat jarring, especially in the beginning. When I write in my journal, I write "Talked to Pete today," and not, "Talked to Pete, my buddy from the academy who trained with me those first six months, today." There are better ways to weave a person's history into a story than overt explanation. I find overt explanation that way very jarring and prefer a more subtle narrative mode.
