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.

Like the real world the fictional world in Dying to Live is brutally unfair. One would expect no less from a book set a year after the world succumbed to zombies. This isn’t a story of the uprising, the slow rot of the human beast. This is a tale part in retrospect, told by characters who are in a brave new world, but still remember and mourn their old world.

Jonah is a man living a grim existence, spared from the initial zombie take over, but finally persuaded to leave his seaborne safe haven to search out his loved ones. After finding his former home empty, with no signs of violence his life took a turn toward simple goals– namely surviving. He wandered the countryside, with no purpose or goal outside of the drive to find food and not become food, until, by a million little coincidences, he finds a compound of survivors.

Hidden in what was once a museum the motley crew of living humans each have their own tales of how they came to safety, their own haunting losses and their own emotional battles to face just to maintain the will to survive in a dangerous world. Jonah and the war refugees wrestle not just with the undead, but with questions of how to, and even if they should, restart society in the face of the horrific future before them.

Flavored with a combination of Biblical end times and a touch of Richard Matheson’s classic I Am Legend, Dying to Live is a novel that transcends the shuffling dead image of classic zombie fiction from the beginning, nearly taming the creatures by giving them an odd sort of humanity and exposing humans as the root of the evil.