Book Review: Flesh Eaters

Being a life-long fan of Horror novels, I look forward to reading each years winner of the Bram Stoker award for best Horror Novel.  The 2012 recipient, Flesh Eaters by Joe McKinney was actually the third novel in his Dead World series, so before I read the award winner I went back and read both Dead City and Apocalypse of the Dead.  As most horror novels are stand alone I haven’t had to do this level of back-story reading since 2004 when Peter Straub’s In the Night Room won, which required me to read four other novel (two of them award winners and all of them quite enjoyable)

Flesh Eaters works like an unending nightmare – it starts in Houston shortly after the events of one Hurricane and just before it is hit by two progressively worse ones.  As the city reels under the very real-life horrors brought on by such a disaster certain survivors begin to act strange, their eyes clouding over and then suddenly craving the flesh of others.

The novel is a prequel to the previous books, which both mention the devastation which took place in Houston , but give only secondhand accounts of it.  The main character is Police Sergeant Eleanor Norton, who, on top of her duties as a police officer during the storm, is also trying to save her own husband and daughter as well as other survivors she finds along the way.

Although I have to admit I was starting to feel pretty zombied-out by the time I got to this book (having received a zombie-themed calendar last year, I’ve actually read more than a dozen zombie-themed books in the last few months), I found the book worked well, introduced a lot of well developed characters into an increasingly horrible situation and will have me keeping an eye out for other books by the author (but I’ll be taking a break from his zombie titles for a while as I’m flexing my fantasy-genre muscles right now).

Genre Character of the Week: Eddie Hudson

Although the majority of my October horror experience was involved in the Saw franchise, I did get to enjoy a few other horror films and books.  Case in point - Dead City by Joe McKinney.  I actually picked up this book because I read the Bram Stoker winner of best horror novel each year, and McKinney's The Flesh Eaters won this year - but as it is the third in the series, I went back to book one, Dead City, and found my genre character of the week, Eddie Hudson.

Eddie is a patrolman in San Antonio, Texas, who spends an average day worrying about a fight he's having with his wife when the dead begin to rise.

From that point on we are treated to Eddie's harrowing escape from a city quickly overrun by the undead and get a good look at how quickly things might fall apart as the people who show up at emergencies (police, fire and ambulance workers) become the first to fall and change.

McKinney, a police officer in San Antonio himself, gives Eddie a great, ground-floor view of a zombie rising from the point of view of the police, and I actually found a lot the technical detail to be really interesting and compelling throughout.

Like my personal favourite zombie-fighting police officer, Eddie comes across as a regular guy in terrible circumstances and although the events of the novel only follow the course of a day, I would definitely be interested in checking out further books featuring the character.