A post-apocalyptic zombie novel from 2007 with slow-moving zombies. Great for beginners of zombie fiction, if you want to ease into it and prefer character-driven stories with not too much action. You won’t escape all that blood and gore and body horror stuff, though. You never will with zombies, but that’s half of the fun anyway, am I right?

(I do warn you, there are some truly disgusting scenes in here! I’ll show you one who stuck with me at the end of my review.)

Origin of the virus is unknown, by the way. The circumstances leading up to the outbreak and apocalypse are unknown. We simply begin with a man, Jonah, who’s all alone out there among the zombies, trying to survive. He then meets other people and joins their community. Once there, he listens to several people’s very personal stories. There are conflicts happening too, but not before you genuinely get your hopes up.

During the first half of the book, I thought: “Oh, so this is what an average zombie novel looks like!” It’s is fraught with either exposition and needless explanations, like for instance advising us that “a bullet anywhere other than through the brain won’t put a zombie down” (17) or that “the bite would kill me and turn me into zombie in a matter of hours or days” (17), as if the reader needs a crash course in how zombies work. It’s a fairly early zombie novel, though, from the beginning of the zombie renaissance (circa 2003-2015), so I guess we can cut the author some slack for that, but the amount of explanations is jarring, and others are more inexcusable, like “you never used a gun if you didn’t have to, for its noise brought lots of unwanted attention” (5) or “they’d all follow the same goal, which was always the same: find someone to kill and eat”(22).

Geeh, okay.

“They were what we, the temporarily living, would inevitably become, each and every one of us – a rotting, tottering, mindless parody of ourselves. (118)

But then the story grew on me. Or rather, the people Jonah meets touched my heart. They work hard for the people they care about, they support each other, save each other, listen to each other. And yeah, then there’s this weirdly captivating guy called Milton. He’s a “smelly messiah with a weird eczema” (84) who “holds a strange power over the dead” (blurb). He was my favorite character, and I believe I won’t forget him for a while. So humble, wise and compassionate. Another reviewer described him perfectly when he said that Milton has a “tremendous desire to not only rebuild a better civilization but a passion for learning from humanity's greatest weaknesses and strengths”.

The conversations between Jonah and the other members of the community reminded me of "World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War" in the sense that we hear their stories from back when it all started, hear about their journey, their struggles. And you get to take in different perspectives. Their accounts aren’t as comprehensive, of course, but I still enjoyed learning about these people. I started to care about them and the way they reimagine a new world ravaged by the undead.

I don’t even think it’s a matter of guilt and innocence anymore. It’s a matter of just trying to keep beautiful things alive in an ugly world. (177)

You also start to think about what makes a good community in the first place, what’s most valuable and what makes it work. How do we make people trust each other, take responsibility and feel better about their lives? The conversation between Jonah and Milton is deep and philosophical and my highlight of the book. Oh, and I just felt so at ease with his love of reading!

“I needed books on what makes people tick, on what they value, on how they get along with each other. So I read, and I learned.” (85)

“Isn’t that strange – we had all his plays, just sitting around, and I never bothered to read them? And now we have to fight and kill to get some copies of his books and others, books that are blowing around at the smashed-up local bookstore, quickly turning into dust. Maybe that was what was wrong with the way we used to live – so many luxuries sitting around that we didn’t appreciate them.” (102)

It’s a fairly quick read, and although it’s not exactly a page-turner most of the time, I think the action and plot moves at a steady pace. Zombie fighting will of course happen too, and those action scenes are just alright and nothing special. Like I said, it’s focused on character and community and general survival in a difficult environment.

On major gripe I had with it was the way the author inserted Christian mythology. To be fair, according to his author profile, Kim Paffenroth is a professor of religious studies, which makes perfect sense. But the characters, especially the main character, would often mention God in their assessments of situations or just make random comments about him, as if to preach his merits and convince the reader that they have a reason to believe in him and thus accepting the possibility of a God. They were conveniently going from saying that God either let things happen for a good reason or that he intervened whenever a great thing happened. Everything happens in God’s favor, of course. Not every time, mind you, there were moments of doubt in the characters, but God seemed to be a recurring talking point a bit too often for my tastes.

“I think the thing that surprised and interested me the most was how so many people agree that people’s souls have several parts. They differ on what to call them, or how many there are, but they agree that there are parts. Had you always known there were several parts? I found it so amazing!” (86)

Other than that, “Dying to live” was overall a very heartwarming reading experience. Who knew? I’ve never been this optimistic about a zombie apocalypse before, but Kim Paffenroth’s uplifting and inspirational community of people shows us what we can always hope to accomplish together, no matter how bad things may look, as long as we have each other.

And even though it didn’t quite make it to a five in rating, I’d still love to read the second book of this trilogy, just because I want to know what happens to the characters. To be able to touch your reader’s hearts like that, can you hope for anything better as a writer?

“I think perhaps we got too spoiled in our old world, and I wanted a world where we’d have beauty, but we’d appreciate it better, not take it for granted.” (103)

New word: Smock = A loose, lightweight overgarment worn to protect the clothing while working.

New information about zombies (specific to this novel): they tend to avoid sunlight. Huh!

Bonus quote, as promised!

“Like the nurse on the first floor, many were missing limbs or parts of their faces or torsos, with viscera and other organs spilling out. Their various open wounds had leaked every bodily fluid, and all this mortal slurry had now dried and decayed into a shiny slime all over them. They rolled around in their own insides just as cheerfully or obliviously as they would in a bubble bath, flesh reveling in flesh, with no respect or shame, and with all its hidden ugliness bursting to the surface.” (150)

Eeewwwwwwwww!