Mr. Matt's Reviews > Rot & Ruin

There are many stories about the outbreak of the impending zombie apocalypse. Tales of those first, terrible days when the horror of the outbreak strikes home. Rot and Ruin, in a pleasant surprise, breaks the mold on zombie stories. It picks up the story fifteen or so years after that first night. The initial chaos is gone. Humanity has figured out how to deal with the undead. They are slow. They are stupid. They are clumsy. While still a terrible threat, they are manageable.

It is in this setting that the story of Benny Imura unfolds. Benny is a fifteen year old kid who is trying to find his place in the fenced in town of Mountainside. Like all kids, at fifteen he must find gainful employment or his rations will be cut. Benny bounces from one to the other before discovering that he has no other alternative than to apprentice with his brother, Tom. Benny can't stand his brother because all he remembers is that his brother ran with him, leaving his mother to his already zombified father.

Tom is a bit of a bounty hunter. A man who brings closure to families by putting their undead loved ones to rest. And this is where the author separates himself from the other zombie apocalypse books out there. Tom teaches his brother that the zombies are more than the shambling undead. They were people once. They had lives and hopes and dreams. They had families. Tom humanizes the undead. And it is effective. Because they are so slow and so stupid and so clumsy, I felt sorry for them. They have no chance against humans who know what they are doing.

Folded over this whole story is a mystery - the mystery of the Lost Girl. On First Night, one of the residents of Mountainside helped a little girl and her sister escape the undead. Benny catches wind of the story and begins digging into it. It turns out that his brother has seen and even spoken to the Lost Girl. Who is she? Why won't she come into town? and why is she killing men? This mystery and the story of the Lost Girl set this book apart. Yes, the living are the real enemy and the undead are simply a danger to be endured - like a storm - but Rot and Ruin takes a new turn on this overdone story line. The story is the mystery - not the overdone story line.

In the end, just a great story - a great story for kids or adults. Four and a half stars rounded down to four. There were a few niggling things that detracted from the whole for me. First, the story started slowly. I did not truly immerse myself into the story until maybe a third of the way in. Next, there were more than a couple of points where I just said "come on!" to myself. There is no way that a certain character wielding a sword could survive certain things. These negatives, however, shouldn't detract from what is a pretty darn good little story. Highly recommend.