R.R. Haywood

Delightfully basic. No super-soldiers. A night manager at the local Tesco has some extraordinary luck as the zombie apocalypse begins. It begins with a nice slice of life that humanizes our narrator, Howie. There's nice moments of fear, violence and humor to keep things moving.

"I inhale deeply and feel the nicotine receptors joining the party held by the sugar dudes in my brain."

This is novelette length, verging on short story, about worth the 99 cent price tag. While it doesn't end on a cliffhanger, it does end as Howie falls asleep, and each subsequent book follows suit. Told in first person, it stays in character without being excessively descriptive or focused on the 'how' of the crisis.… (more)

A little more up and down to the quality of the book for me. Howie finds the whisper of hope for his parents irresistible. One of the attractions so far is that humans are still trying and not descending into warring with each other--yet.

As Howie journeys back to his town, he ends up in a strip club, one of my least favorite scenes of the book. The porny scene with the club owner is absolutely bizarre and left me downrating the story for its illogic and voyeurism. If there was something Haywood was trying to say about how people chose to act at the end of the world, it could have been done so much better. Still, the return to Tesco and discovering David was a high point. I like the interactions between David and Howie, which give us a sense of David's more limited range, and Howie's care in talking with him.

Enough to go on with.… (more)

This book - the whole trilogy -, was a hugely pleasant surprise. One of those rare cases, where sequels are even better than the first book. The biggest flaws for me were actually things that could have been edited out easily - too many repetitions and in some places, the pace of the story was just dragging on, too much explaining and overexplaining things which were already implied and made clear before.
Somewhere in the middle and a bit farther I was sure that yes, the book is pretty good, but the sequels are not for me. Until ... Yeah. The ending made it all worthwhile and I gobbled up both "Executed" and "Extinct" as fast as I could. And they were so much better!… (more)