Dying to Live: Life Sentence by Kim Paffenroth

Trade Paperback: 9781934861110, $14.95

Dying to Live, both the original and this book, the sequel, are heralded as “the intelligent man’s zombie novel” and I can’t think of a better description than that.

The second book picks up twelve years after the first as Zoey, the baby rescued at the end of the first book, prepares to be inducted into life as an adult-in-training. Between Jack, Will (aka Popcorn) and Milton (the other zombie Christ figure) the survivors have branched out quite a bit from their initial encampment in a museum. Now part of a prosperous town, with the zombie threat so far diminished that terror and survival has given way to a ritualistic reverence of the ambulatory dead, Zoey concentrates with precocious skill on the nature of their existence and surviving in a new kind of world.

As she faces danger from zombies and other humans she slices into the nature of the people around her (dead, living and somewhere between) with a painfully keen intellect. Harder-core horror fans shouldn’t be disappointed. Through the commentary on human nature there are fights, gore, moaning undead and more.

There are also peculiar things happening among the dead, including a pair of zombies who seem to remember their lives before death, and who refuse to be dismissed as mere mindless creatures of hunger. Truman, once a philosophy professor, now a dead man, challenges the town’s perceptions of the creatures who destroyed the world with his refusal to eat flesh and his joy of reading.

And because Paffenroth himself is a shrewd flayer of human behavior, there are not-so-subtle reminders that the walking dead are far less sinister than the living who embrace cruelty and savagery.

It’s very readable, smooth and insightful. Intelligently horrific and outright beautiful in places, it’s a must-read for zombie fans looking for something more than a zombie uprising story of a motley crew being picked off one by one.