Dead Haven by Flint Maxwell

Despite having read an awful lot of horror stuff over the years somehow I have managed to avoid ever reading a zombie book before.  To be fair, I'm not really a fan of zombie movies so have pretty much avoided them based on that fact.  I was a little tentative going in to this one to be honest but I found myself really enjoying it.  Yes, it is as corny as all get out and you pretty much know where things are going and the reason for the zombie apocalypse descending on Small Town America is ridiculously cliched.  You know what, that is what every zombie film I've ever had the misfortune to sit through was like so I'm guessing the more literary version should be the same.

Whilst Dead Haven doesn't bring anything new or innovative to the table, it does entertain.  There's plenty of shuffling, groaning dead flesh that is managing to wander about (okay, so they only murmured "Brains" in my mind) and do a moderate amount of problem solving to get at the lovely warm human flesh.  Nicely gory scenes that manage to walk the tightrope between gross and disturbing adeptly.  There is a sort of plot but honestly it doesn't really matter that Jack Jupiter is obsessed about getting back to his fiancee Darlene.  It doesn't matter that he is cooped up with the father of his school bully (who clearly taught his son all he knows).  It doesn't matter that we get introduced to a fair number of people because most of them are going to die anyway.

This book gave me a great deal of reading pleasure.  I could unplug from the world for a bit and just enjoy myself bobbing around on the periphery of a videogame treatment with a few authorly bells and whistles.  For all I know this could be a terrible exponent of the genre but that matters less to me than how much fun I had reading it.  Would I look out the following 7 books in the series?  Probably not to be honest - it was fun but I don't care about the characters or their situation enough to want to see what happens next.