Friday, October 22, 2010

Review: Zombies: A Hunter's Guide

Joseph A. McCullough, 2010, Osprey Publishing

Zombies: A Hunter's Guide purports to be a manual detailing the threat posed by zombies, and how best to deal with it. While this sort of approach has been taken in previous zombie-themed publications, Z:AHG is well worth reading, as the author has applied some effective and unique world-building to the text, positing a reality in which the walking dead have always been with us, and extrapolating their effect upon human history and present-day society. The book also manages to successfully and inventively reconcile the existence of various types of zombie (voodoo, necromantic, revenant, atomic and viral) into the workings of McCullough's alternate history, which further underpins the reality of his imagined world.

Effectively illustrated throughout, Zombies: A Hunter's Guide is a genuinely engrossing read, and one that should appeal to zomlit fans who appreciate intelligent creativity within the genre.

(Zombies: A Hunter's Guide is distributed in Australia by Capricorn Link.)