I never set out to be the zombie-hating guy. I mean, I always loved the zombie movies and books. I remember when, back in the mid-70's, I watched Night of the Living Dead on late night TV. I was already a horror fan, but I knew that George Romero's film was something completely different than anything that had come before. This was nothing like the Universal Monsters, the atomic mutations, the lurid Hammer productions. Night of the Living Dead was the future of horror and I think I knew it at the time.

Dawn of the Dead was an even bigger revelation to me. Romero took us deeper into the minds of the hapless survivors heads as he showed us unflinching zombie mayhem.

1985 brought on two important zombie movies. Romero's third (and last great) zombie epic, Day of the Dead was released, and Dan O'Bannon introduced the zombie comedy with Return of the Living Dead. The rest, as they say, is history.

Heck, I even like those Godawful Italian zombie movies.

Few horror readers were happier than I was when Skipp and Spector unleashed their groundbreaking Books of the Dead anthologies of zombie stories.

Yeah man, you could say I was always a zombie fan. But something started happening around ten years ago.

Danny Boyle directed a sort of revisionist zombie movie called 28 Days Later. Produced on a low budget, it was quite successful. Zack Snyder remade Romero's Dawn of the Dead in 2004. This remake divided longtime horror fans, but it too was a popular success. And a year before that, in 2003, enfant terrible horror writer Brian Keene's debut novel, The Rising, was published.

Those three projects were catalysts in The Zombie Revolution. Everyone started getting in on the act. Zombie novels and stories were popping up all over the place. The low-budget horror arena began to be overpopulated by zombie movies. Entire publishers seemed to be dedicated to fiction of the undead. You couldn't (and still can't) take a stroll through the genre without tripping over a zombie anthology or two. Cities were having Zombie Walks.

And it got worse. Soon writers were exhuming treasured works of literature and befouling them with zombies. Nothing was sacred. It was shameful.

I gradually weaned off of zombie stories. Enough was enough. Too much, in fact. I began to refuse to accept zombie books for review. We at Horror Drive-In received some terrible examples of zombie fiction. I just couldn't take it any more. A once-cherished sub-genre run into the ground.

Of course I never like to say never again. Now and then I'll check out zombies. I said that I'd never see the comedy film, Zombieland, but I ended up doing so, and I ended up liking it. Recently a read a zombie novel by J.F. Gonzalez called Back from the Dead, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. So when a publicist from Tor Books contacted me about reviewing an upcoming zombie book, I decided to give it a chance.

I felt that it should be more than a mere review. I've publicly spoken of my disdain for zombies quite a bit. So why not take the book on with an open mind, and call it The Zombie Challenge?

The book in question is The First Days: As the World Dies, and it's by a writer I had never heard of named Rhiannon Frater. I learned that The First Days had originally been published as an online serial, and was later self-published. My experiences with reading self-published fiction have been painful ones, but I was encouraged that The First Days was being published by a major publisher, and not something like Gutmunch Press.

I also heard that The First Days dealt, at least in part, with lesbians. That seemed to inspire sniggering from various quarters for some reason. I was intrigued. Thoughts of Poppy Z. Brite's electrifying Lost Souls came to mind.

And so the galley of The First Days arrived at my doorstep. I dutifully finished the book I had been reading at the time, and then plunged into Rhiannon Frater's book.

The First Days begins with an arresting image: a small child's fingers reaching under the slot of a door. It was a toddler trying to get through to consume its mother. Just like that, the zombie plague had begun.

To be honest, The First Days offers nothing new to the zombie mythology as we know it. But that's all right. I don't mind revisiting the genre's tropes. It's fun to read stories about vampires, werewolves, serial killers, and even zombies. Just give me good writing, well-drawn characters, and a swift paced story, and I'm set.

I'm happy to report that The First Days is a very-written novel. Frater introduces and establishes a nice cast of characters, and even while she peppers her story with ample graphic violence, she never forgets the humanity of the people in the novel. The First Days moves along nicely as the zombie plague is unleashed on society, and we get to know two very different, but empathetic female characters. But when the two women find shelter at a hastily developed compound, The First Days really kicks into high gear. The focus is not as much on zombie mayhem, but human interaction. The survivors must deal with an unthinkable outbreak of flesh-eating dead, but the same emotions we all deal with challenge their lives: infatuation, jealousy, uncertainty, distrust, fear.

The First Days is the first book in a trilogy, and I already look forward to parts two and three. I've come to know and like these characters, and I want to see how Frater deals with their fates in the next books in the series. Can you ask any more than that?

Oh yeah, despite what you may have heard, The First Days isn't really a lesbian story.

So yeah, I'm glad that I read The First Days, and I think you'll enjoy it too. Whether you're a dyed in the wool zombie fan, or one such as I who is sick of the subject.

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