Review: Dead of Night: A Zombie Novel by Jonathan Maberry

Title: Dead of Night: A Zombie Novel
Author: Jonathan Maberry | Website
Available: Now
Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Horror/Zombies
Source: Amazon Vine










Description via Goodreads:


A prison doctor injects a condemned serial killer with a formula designed to keep his consciousness awake while his body rots in the grave.  But all drugs have unforeseen side-effects.  Before he could be buried, the killer wakes up.  Hungry.  Infected.  Contagious.  This is the way the world ends.  Not with a bang…but a bite.


My thoughts:


Dead of Night takes place in a small Pennsylvania town that becomes infested with flesh eating zombies after a notorious serial killer, injected with a serum that would cause his conciousness to stay aware once he was buried, awakes in the local funeral home and starts feasting on the unsuspecting residents. The epidemic spreads quickly through the small town and soon even the police force have become one of the walking dead. 



Over the course of Dead of Night we see the chaos through the eyes of numerous characters. I found this quite difficult to follow for the the first 50-80 pages, but once I had become used to Maberry's writing style and the "voices" of his characters I was able to read the remaining 300 pages without difficulty. I liked that we not only saw the action via the villains and heroes, but from the POV of one of the infected. It was interesting to experience the thought process of a character carrying the infection. To know a little awareness still remained made this novel all the more frightening.


With so many characters weighing in, you'd think character development would be lacking. This wasn't the case. I sympathized with those fighting for the greater good and despised the bad guys. You won't believe who ends up being the bad guys in this one! Officer Dez Fox is determined to save her little town. She is a character that comes into this madness all ready emotionally damaged. It seems characters that share this quality are always more willing to put their life on the line. I liked her though and her partner J.T.


I'd most definitely recommend this to anyone who enjoys a gruesome (emphasis on the gruesome) tale of zombies taking over the world one small town at a time. The ending of Dead of Night was wide open, and I wouldn't be surprised to see it turn into a series (and I definitely wouldn't complain).

My Rating: