Review - Undead (omnibus) by John Russo

Undead by John Russo
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Time take to read - 2 days

Publisher - Titan Books

Pages - 306

Source - The Works bookshop

Blurb from Amazon

Zombie Double Bill!

George A. Romero's classic 1968 film Night of the Living Dead launched a new era of gut-munching mayhem, terrorizing moviegoers and launching the zombie movie phenomenon. John A. Russo co-wrote the screenplay for the movie and turned the flesh-eating frenzy into two horrific, blood-drenching novels, collected here in one terrifying volume. Undead is a gruesome, suspenseful horror at its best.


My Review

This book is a double whammy of zombie, two stories in one book. The first one is Night of the Living Dead, this is the same story as the movie. We open with a journey to their fathers grave and proceed to the graveyard with a brother and sister, Barbara and Johnny. Johnny is angry with Barbara and starts teasing her about the dead coming to get her, he sees a man approaching and says heres one now. Little realizing it is indeed coming and launches an attack leaving Barbara with no choice but to flee. She comes upon an abandoned house and meets Ben soon after, Barbara is in a state of shock and soon the undead are surrounding the house and wanting their warm flesh.

The book follows the movie fairly closely, from what I remember. It is a tale of survival, humans reacting how you would expect them to whilst trying to survive a flesh eating zombie outbreak. It is really good, I liked the movie when I saw it years ago however I actually preferred the book.

The second book is Return of the Living Dead, this is a bit more widespread, the first story is almost completely around one house and a handful of people. This one we see quite a few characters, spread over locations and it is actually set with the previous outbreak mentioned and linked in. Some people are still cautious with the previous outbreak and act on any newly deceased person, just in case. The outbreak this time starts again, fairly quickly with some throwback to the last outbreak which I actually thought was well done as too often it is just a new tale. There is a range of issues dealt with and again different human reactions to the outbreak however this one shows the more deprived aspect and darker nature of some of our fellow humans. In some of the scenes the acts of the humans is worse than the cannibalism of the undead is actually worse.

As both books are set over a day or two it isn't purely about survival but also human behavior, how some people will look out for only themselves, behave appallingly and how others will step up to the mark when it is called upon. Certainly different from most of the zombie books I have read, I liked these stories although felt there was quite a few similarities in how they transpired and ended. 3/5 for me and I would of course read any more zombie tales I find by this author, I will actually need to look and see what, if any, they have available.

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