Monster Nation Book

This is the sequel to Monster Island but is set in the time frame before that book. This book sets up how the "virus" was first found in a prison and its spread throughout the West. We see the infection through the eyes of a normal person - Bannerman Clark - and through the eyes of a thinking zombie (who has no name until the end).

It was interesting to see the spread of the infection (and pretty accurate as far as I know) but I liked Monster Island better. That could be because I knew the setting of NYC much better than the Western US or it could be because there was more conflict in the first book.

I didn't like the idea of sending the zombie woman to go shut down the source and the explanation of why it happened just pushed my suspension of disbelief too far. What I had the most trouble with was the timeline. The zombie woman meets Mael Mag Och (the evil peat mummy from Monster Island) as a spiritual manifestation. He is guiding her east and trying to get her to help him spread the infection. At the end, he tells her that there are only a few thinking zombies and he names the doctor in Manhattan (the major zombie character from Monster Island) as one of them. But in Monster Island, we are told that he didn't become a zombie until well into the infection after NYC was overrun and that character didn't meet Mael Mag Och until after he was separated from the African girl paramilitary group. So it would seem that the two timelines don't quite match up enough for Mael to know of the existence of both these thinking zombies.

I'll be reading the third book - Monster Planet - to see if the author can create a fun zombie story like the first one. I think this novel is useful to have a better understanding of the zombies of this series but it left me a little cold.