"He'll be fine, son. I done seen many a men take worse on the battlefield and live to tell the tale" - Brady

Chris Commons is on the road with his folk band when the whip comes down and the zombie apocalypse breaks out like rage at a Friday afternoon shoe sale. As the undead take to the streets craving living flesh Chris, his fellow band members Steve and Mark, and a coffee shop waitress Stephanie try to work out what's happening and how they are going to make it out of Dodge before they are added to the dinner roll call. Not everyone is going to survive the initial onslaught or the rednecks taking to the streets.

Later the survivors run across Brady and Nan, a Texas couple with more firepower than a platoon of marines. Together the group make for a local school that is listed as a survivor centre and discover an isolated island of safety in a sea of decaying horror. While waiting for the National Guard to arrive Chris begins to question the situation and what the real agenda of their would be saviours is. Of course with the undead numbers multiplying at the fences can it be long before this final outpost of humanity is overrun? Sometimes waiting can be the hardest thing of all as Chris is about to discover.

Recently there's been a deluge of zombie literature of varied quality as the Publishers try to hook up with a perceived wave of interest. This is only set to increase with the forthcoming World War Z movie, that while being highly anticipated may not be the box office goliath that many are predicting. Like the late 1980s surge in horror literature the problem is of course that the sub genre will burn itself out quickly as sub standard writing is thrown onto the bonfire of public demand. Just how much zombie writing do you really want to wade through before it becomes all too familiar and you turn your eyes toward other dark genre material that offers something fresh.

It's into this maelstrom that P. A. Douglas wades with 2012's Epidemic of the Undead, a novel that is firmly set in the recently churned grave of zombie fare. While the book does hit the tropes, guy eventually gets girl, at least one character is on a journey to self realisation, survivors finding a fortified location to make a stand, it does so in a fairly new approach to the sub genre. A breath of fresh air in a mausoleum if you like. From memory no one has ever approached the zombie apocalypse from the viewpoint of a folk band at a dinner, it's the sort of thing we'd expect from Lloyd Kaufman and the crew at Troma. So on the bright side you get something interesting and a new viewpoint of how things go down as the decaying hordes start gatecrashing the suburban party. And I got to say the characters are written in believable fashion, they don't know what's going down, they spend the first block of the novel on simply surviving the onslaught, prior to figuring out the dead have come back to life and are lusting after living flesh.

Where the novel falls down however is in how quickly things happen, there's an epic quality to the plot here that are rushed through in a sort of scattergun approach to cramming everything into a page length that is nowhere near enough to accommodate the ideas being delivered. Society has seemingly broken down overnight, where is the much vaunted U.S tactical response groups, national guard, army, people with sharp sticks? - instead we get rednecks on a rampage. Where are the citizens? Guess a whole bunch of people are hiding out in their homes as the town pretty much has zero live people battling the zombie hordes. While I get the requirements of the narrative I simply wasn't believing things would deteriorate this quickly.

Equally there's love among the ashes, almost as if it's a requirement of a fiction narrative from some obscure writing course, the expected collision between our central characters and what remains of authority, and to top things off a brief lapse into religious metaphysics. It's all in there in a sort of mixed salad of ideas and plot notions that has the novel bursting at the seams.

When I started the whole criticism thing, at University, one of the examples used to demonstrate poor film making was surprisingly The Amityville Horror, original not the asinine rehash. Watch the movie and work out the major scenes, it won't take long, then note the filler put in to drive the movie between the major scenes. Epidemic of the Undead suffers for mine from the same problems, there are major scenes, with a bunch of description and action between the scenes to move things along. Strange to tell, as it probably breaches numerous idea of good novel structure, I much prefer novels that evolve in a sort of fluid fashion rather than being planned out in advance.

While I certainly wasn't taken out of the novel at any stage I got to say it wouldn't have missed another pass by the Editor. There are some clumsy paragraphs and the odd grammatical error that will have people wondering if perhaps Mr Douglas writes for Scaryminds. We're not talking sins against the language of the level of Stephenie Meyer here, Douglas is a far superior writer to the sort of trash Meyer throws up on the kitchen table, but some readers may just find it a tad jarring in places. Hey if you are anal and a member of the grammar police we won't hold it against you.

While I know a lot of people will look at Epidemic of the Undead and think just another zombie novel Douglas is trying for something slightly different here to the usual penny dreadful being pumped out. I was onboard for the majority of the narrative, dug the end - didn't see it coming, and for sure would dial into another title by the Author. Sure it's not going to be the best writing style you run across this year, but hey you're reading this site so does it really matter? A recommended novel for zombie fans and for anyone that wants an energetic read that isn't going to overly tax you.

Epidemic of the Undead has been unleashed by Severed Press and is available in both print copy and electronic formats. Go on get some zombie on your Kindle.