Kelly (and the Book Boar)'s Reviews > Rot & Ruin

Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/

“Save words like ‘sorry.’ Save for the dead. Living don’t need them.”



Seriously. Once I ran through the gamut of vampires and werewolves and angels (oh my!) a few years ago, zombies were the next obvious choice. I plowed through zombie horror stories, zombie romance stories, zom-coms, you name it – but somehow I managed to miss this one.

When the Zombie Apocalypse finally takes place, I have a feeling we’ll find this to be the most true to how we all will live.

1. In all actuality no one will probably ever figure out exactly what caused the zombie uprising to begin with. All we will know is one night the world went to shit and everything changed . . .

“I think that it doesn’t matter one little bit. It happened. The dead rose, we fell. We lost the war and we lost the world. End of story. How it happened doesn’t matter much to anyone anymore. We’re living next door to the apocalypse, kid.”

2. The “Rot and Ruin” is the best description of what a zombie world will be. And the Ruin is going to be the equivalent of Vegas . . .

“There’s no law past the fence line. What’s done in the Ruin, stays in the Ruin.”

3. The Ruin will be hazardous for your health. Not only will it be riddled with undead, but it will be completely overgrown and extremely difficult to navigate . . .



4. Zombies will outnumber humans by A LOT and good ol ‘Murica will probably jump the gun and do something stupid like drop nukes on cities – which will create even MORE zombies, forcing the majority of the population to live in fear and behind fences in order to keep us safe from the hoard . . . .



5. We will discover most of what we think we know about zombies is not really true . . .

“And that myth about the zombies being afraid of fire? That’s stupid. They can’t think or feel. They’re not afraid of anything.”

6. And finally we will eventually come to realize that although zombies are extremely interested in nom-nomming on the living, they used to be our family members or friends so we will be faced with the moral dilemma of whether or not to treat them humanely . . .



I loved this book. For a second I had doubts and thought it was going to go down the slippery slope to Shitville with an instalove story, but it quickly redeemed itself and remained great. I loved this so much it’s getting shelved as “YA for Grown-Ups” because I think some of the nuances of the plot wouldn’t be fully appreciated by the younger set (a/k/a my own kid). Most surprising of all, I loved this one so much I want to read the second book in the series (and I NEVER want to read the second book in the series). Hey, I gotta find out what really goes down in Gameland, right?!?!?!?!