Married with Zombies, by Jesse Petersen

I just finished this fun, quick read tonight. It's book 3 of my 100 Books in 1 Year challenge (I'm soooo far behind!). The first in the series, Married With Zombies is  a fun take on the zombie genre. 

More helpful than most relationship
self-help books on the market today!

We meet Sarah and Dave as they are on their way to yet another session with their marriage counselor in another seemingly futile attempt to save their crumbling relationship. Of course, this day is also the beginning of the zombie apocalypse, but the two are so wrapped up in their own petty problems to notice the odd happenings around them. Think of the movie Shaun of the Dead, where Shaun is making his way to work and their are quirky hints/omens of things to come going on in the background, but Shaun is so hung up on striking out with his girlfriend to notice. But once Dave and Sarah get to the counselor's office, their world comes crashing down. Does one have to pay for therapy when the therapist tries to rip your neck open?

Fleeing for their lives, the dysfunctional couple still manages to take pot-shots and digs at each other while battling their zombified landlord and bashing their slacker neighbor's head it with a toilet seat (really, one of the best zombie death scenes I have ever read/seen, very cathartic and real). As husband and wife battle for their lives, the unlikely pair have to decide if their dislike for each other is greater than their will to live. Can two people so ready for divorce face the annihilation of the human race and make it out in one piece?

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's a quick read (less than a hundred pages per my Nook), but yet it grabs your attention and interest in the characters as they battle their way out of zombie stricken Seattle. With a mix of humor (I mean, how can you survive zombies without a little dark sense of humor?), emotion, horror, and action, Jesse Petersen brings a not-so-new but seldom used vehicle to the zombie genre: real human drama and interaction. Again, much like Shaun of the Dead, we are brought into the lives of real people, with real problems before, during, and after the zombie plague, and are invited to experience the humanness and reality of it all. Any other zombie movie or book focuses so much on the basis element of survival, of beating the zombies and protecting the little group of survivors from marauding bands of psycho survivors, that more often than not true human relationships and growth are missed. At the beginning of the book, when the two were in their "we're this close to a divorce" state, there were times when each threatened to abandon the other for the sake of survival---and that they couldn't open their mouths without fighting. We see Sarah and Dave develop over the course of the first book as they assess what's really important. 

Each chapter is titled in such a way that you wouldn't be surprised to see those same words listed in the Table of Contents of a real relationship self-help book, but twisted to fit the zombie world we're now in; this helps to bring the reader into a surreal world of zombie couples therapy the book proposes, and strangely it works. Once I get my Nook's wifi working, I will be downloading book two of this series, Flip This Zombie, as well as book three, Eat, Slay, Love. I guess if I would have to give this new flavor of zombie books a "name", I would call it "cozy horror" (like "cozy mysteries"): not too hard core with gore or the scare factor, but just enough to stay true to the overall genre while throwing in humor and some touchy-feely stuff to boot.

If you're not too big into horror, but want something with bite (Ha!), I'd recommend picking up this series-starter. On my scale of 1 (literary hari kari) to 10 (literary orgasmic bliss), I give this book a 6.5-7 rating. It wasn't anything mind-blowing or genre-shattering, just an enjoyable tale, and there's nothing wrong with that. =^_^=