Review: Slowly We Rot

Slowly We Rot by Bryan Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Noah lives by himself in a cabin in the mountains in the waning days of the zombie apocalypse. When he's forced out of his idyllic nest, what will the world hold for him? What happens in a world ravaged by a zombie plague when most of the zombies are gone?

As I stated in my review for The Rising, I thought I was over zombies until recently. After The Rising, I was hungry for another bite. When Brian Keene tweeted that Slowly We Rot was only 99 cents, I pounced on it like flesh eaters on a bunch of hapless teenagers.

"So what happens to the survivors?" seems to be the theme of Slowly We Rot. Noah is wrenched out of his mountain paradise and decides to go searching for the girl who got away. It has some thematic similarities to The Rising but it's a much deeper book.

Slowly We Rot is a book about dealing with substance abuse almost as much as it is one about dealing with the everyday menaces of a zombie apocalypse. It took awhile for Noah's backstory to unfold. By the time I understood the scope of his addiction, he was far away from home, too far to turn back. I understood things weren't as they seemed past a certain point but not the depths of which Bryan Smith had hoodwinked me up to that point.

In my eyes, Smith crafted a pretty accurate account of what would happen in the dying days of humanity after the zombies die off, from the scavenging to people being utter crapheads to each other. It's the uncertainty of what was real and what wasn't that really docks Slowly We Rot a star. The break from reality took me out of the story. Somewhere around the 75% mark, my enthusiasm wore off. While I enjoyed the latter part of the book, the previous 75% was five star material.

That's about all I have to say, I guess. For a zombie book that didn't have all that much zombie action in it, Slowly We Rot is a pretty great read. Four out of five stars.

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