Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End by Manel Loureiro

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The dead rise…

A mysterious incident in Russia, a blip buried in the news—it’s the only warning humanity receives that civilization will soon be destroyed by a single, voracious virus that creates monsters of men.

Humanity falls…

A lawyer, still grieving over the death of his young wife, begins to write as a form of therapy. Bur he never expected that his anonymous blog would ultimately record humanity’s last days.

The end of the world has begun…

Governments scramble to stop the zombie virus, people panic, so-called “Safe Havens” are established, the world erupts into chaos; soon it’s every man, woman, and child for themselves. Armed only with makeshift weapons and the will to live, a lone survivor will give mankind one last chance against…

Apocalypse Z

I had a lot of mixed feelings about this story. It started out okay, though it was rather slow. I was intrigued with the idea that the main character, a lawyer whose name was never mentioned, had been writing a blog at the time the zombie apocalypse was just beginning. He was able to document the whole thing from his unique perspective, all because his wife had died and his doctor had recommended he start blogging as a form of therapy.

 

This had all the makings of a great story, but rather than just starting off slow, this book continued at a slow pace. It got so boring in some areas that I really had to force myself to continue on. I also found myself rolling my eyes a lot at the lawyer's luck:

1. He just happened to live in a home that was surrounded by a 10 foot wall, as his wife had wanted privacy.
2. His power had been going out a lot, so he just happened to get solar panels installed on his roof for electricity, just in case.
3. He didn't care to go out a lot, so he just happened to decide to buy about 2 weeks worth of food at the grocery store, and stock up on water.

I mean, come on. What are the chances? Still, it did add a bit of humor in that he was completely clueless as to what was going on. When he finally realized that there was a sickness going around, he never even once thought of zombies. At some point in the book, he mentions zombies from films, yet how could he not think that any of the symptoms mentioned on the news or online could have been zombies? Nowadays I'm sure that many people would have come to that conclusion sooner, no matter how hard it is to believe that would really happen.

At any rate, I was glad I made myself finish the novel, because the ending was well worth it. It moved at a much faster pace, and was actually pretty scary (the lawyer ended up in a hospital at one point, which zombie aficionados would know to be infested with zombies). It's true that at some point in the novel, the blog & journal entries stopped looking like actual written entries, & more like regular chapters in a book, but I was okay with that because it allowed for the action to be better described.

This book is the first in a trilogy by Spanish author Manel Loureiro, and is translated into English by Pamela Carmell. I'm unsure as to whether I'll continue this series or not - the last part of the novel was really good, but the majority of it had still been rather slow and dull. Maybe if Amazon offers the sequels as free for members of Amazon Prime to borrow, like this one was, then I'll give them a try. It's possible that this first novel was only dry because it had to detail the very beginning of the apocalypse from such a clueless-seeming perspective. It may also be the translation from Spanish to English that made it dry, though I would never know unless I learned Spanish and read the original version. I wouldn't read the first one again, though, which is why I'll give it 2 Stars.