Rot & Ruin (review)

"The Rot and Ruin is the real world. Our town isn't anything more than the last bits of mankind's dream, and we're stuck here until we die off." That's the view from Benny Imura's small and shrinking community of Mountainside, a walled enclosure cut off from what's left of the outside world, which isn't much: a few small outposts of humanity, the townspeople imagine, and the rest a desolate wasteland overrun by zombies. Now that he's fifteen, Benny needs a job, and the only employer who will take him is his much-older brother, Tom. A soft-spoken zombie hunter who has raised Benny since their parents died (or, more accurately, un-died), Tom evinces none of the bravado that Benny admires in other seemingly cooler hunters. Off the brothers go into the Rot and Ruin, where Benny bonds with Tom, barely escapes death by numerous unpleasant perils, and drastically reevaluates the meaning of the words "cool," "brave," and "monster." Mountainside has the feel of a frontier town complete with vigilantes and outlaws, and the author's dystopian touches create an eerie, evocative past/future mash-up that feeds the drama. Unfortunately, the plotting and character development fall short, the former hinging on a clichéd villain's human-versus-zombie gladiatorial enterprise and the feral girl who escaped it, and the latter on Benny's oversentimentalized relationship with his brother and improbably hasty conversion from extreme zombie-hatred to philosophical compassion. Still, horror fans will appreciate the gorge-raising descriptions of the shambling zombies ("All it was now was dead meat and broken bones and stuff that glistened and dripped"), while zombie-apocalypse aficionados will cotton to the solid world-building and refreshingly old-school undead.