If the Snow Doesn't Get You...

... the zombies will! Actually, with the exception of the cold seeping through the walls, the snow hasn't been as bad as I'd expected it to be. Course it won't be going anywhere anytime soon since it's not really warm enough out to melt.

I've still got a growing stack of zombie reads in the TBR (yay!), but just had to bump David Moody's Autumn: The City up to the top when it arrived. Moody, you may remember, is the UK author who grabbed not only readers' and publishers' attention but movie maker Guillermo del Toro as well when he first released Autumn online for free and then published Hater on his own as well.

Hater marked the author's US debut and was followed very quickly by it's sequel Dog Blood and the publication of Autumn, which was released Stateside in October. In the book, a mass infection has wiped out most of the population, leaving very few survivors. Then the dead begin to rise and as time goes by they become more drawn to those survivors and more aggressive as well.

With Autumn: The City, a new group of survivors is introduced. With transportation and communication lines down, they're essentially trapped within the city itself. Hiding in offices and other city buildings, they scavenge for food and fight to survive. When a soldier joins their ranks, they finally begin to see a bit of hope on the horizon, but the future of mankind is still uncertain.

The series is very reminiscent of Survivors, which was a favorite of mine when it made it's way over on BBCA. Sad to see it go, but as I've mentioned before I'm a sucker for the apocalypse (which, as with Survivors, does not always involve zombies, though I'm a sucker for them as well). The human element is such that while we want to believe that hard work and persistence will pay off, no one can deny that stress and limited resources would cause more chaos. The question that comes into play is whether the survivors can get through that and figure out a way to make it through or if they -- and not the dead -- will be their own downfall in the end.

I thought I'd read an article about what zombies represent in popular fiction, but I can't find the exact one I was thinking about. Instead, have fun with this article from the New York Times and this one from the Huffington Post, both from last December.

Anywho, the horde of zombie related fiction is still hitting shelves, so if the apocalypse does come (and I survive), I'll still have plenty to read on the subject!