Glad it is a good read. I have a copy of the audio but have not read it yet. I confess zombie wise I've been a little disappointed of late.

I read some of Mark Tufo's Zombie fallout series, but was not impressed, mostly because the main character was a really unpleasant right wing american nutcase who kept rambling on about "A man's duty" and everyone female was either pathetic or waspish, there was also far too much toilet humour, ie, descriptions of bad smells for the sake of it (gore is one thing,but intensive descriptions of how zombies smell like public toilets is quite another). Also the books seemed to be build to a climax and go no where, indeed had I not really badly hurt my arm at the time and was quite limited in reading matter I probably wouldn't have bothered finishing the series.

I then tried Peter Clines X heroes series, which had the idea of super heroes plus the zombocalypse. It would've been okay if he'd stuck to the idea, however each book got a bit random and introduced more and more rubbish, for example one had demons, and because most of his heroes were nearly invincible to zombies the books felt a little unfare on the ordinary humans. They did have some good ideas and action sequences, indeed i actually liked the light he painted the Us military in, and also I have to give some credit for a fellow Whovian (he mentions Classic and modern Who several times and even has a couple of in jokes), however all in all they were rather meh, a bit of fun, but generally forgettable over all.

Earlier this year I read world war Z by Max Brooks, which had some lovely pictures of international countries. My only two problems however were that firstly it concentrated waaaaaaay too much on America to supposedly be a world war, andsecondly that with showing us a lot of survivers, most of the surviver stories ended in random places and didn't get follow up. Indeed, I was sort of annoyed that we got three or four segments from the American army captain, but only a couple from much more interesting people, the young girl trapped in the snows in Canida, or the chinese neuclear sub in a community in the south seas, not to mention the Muslim in Israil forced to change his mind about Jews when he found that zombies were worse! Really, compared to all those places and stories, America and the ausomeness of the Us military just didn't do it for me, ---- oh, and it didn't help that his one single and only character representing the Uk was some old lord talking about how Jolly fine castles were and how those bloody nasty zombies were kept out of the twoer of London, where the Jolly old queen was still doing her bit for good old blighty what what old bean! .

So, yes, good story, but a little lacking in parts.

By far the single best modern Zombie story I've read is Justin Cronin's passage series, namely the Passage and it's sequel, the twelve. The zombies aren't exactly zombies, they're somewhat like vampires and somewhat just plane monstrous, and the society and world are really well put together, indeed one thing I love about the passage books is that they don't concentrate on the time immediately after the zombocalypse but have bits of setup during the zombocalypse itself, then most of the books set 90 years later in a very different world with some quite unique ideas.

What particularly makes the passage books awsome though are the characters, just like in We're Alive, including the fact that the books are very unpredictable on who will and will not survive and how. I'm hoping the third book, the City of Mirrors will be out soon. In the mean time I'd recommend the first two to anyone.

The books have been compared rather to The Stand, though for me they have a somewhat different feel.

Apart from We're alive and Justin Cronin, both of which are absolutely awsome, I will confess most modern zombie fiction hasn't done it for me. I'll gladly try some more stuff, including Ethan Read but it does seem the genre is getting to be rather dominated by standard tropes which doesn't make for stories that really keep you on the edge of your seat if you can predict what is happening.

This indeed is probably why I will always be a bigger fan of scifi or fantasy, sinse then you have a hole new world to explore with it's own rules, customs and characters, not just our own world gone a bit bad. Then again, something like Justin Cronin's the passage might come along and make me completely change my mind, and mayby Ethan read will too, I don't know.