1.5 rounded up to 2 (just okay)

Book 3 of my zombie-a-thon,

CW: About what you'd expect in a zombie horror

Well that was filled with sooooo much toxic masculinity and a side helping of racism paired with some vintage fat-shaming.

It was all passed off as humorous jokes, but I don't know guys, are quips about men covering up their emotions by making jokes about oestrogen levels and needing to use tampax and feeling embarrassed about even having emotions when they lose loved ones still where we are at as a society? I feel like we have moved on from this macho-man type behaviour.

It did end on a cracker cliff-hanger and I am going to give one more book a go because I want to know how they get out of this cluster-fudge . ( )

Second go around with this series. I laughed and cried just as much as I did the first time!! ( )

I try to express only my most honest opinion in a spoiler-free way. Unfortunately, there is still always a risk of slight spoilers despite my best efforts. If you feel something in my review is a spoiler please let me know. Thank you.

This series is so good. I love the narrator used in the audiobooks for it. This one explains Eliza better and leaves an ominous feeling to it. Other than that not much to say its a great series and I'll be continuing it for sure. ( )

Did Tufo have an editor? Because this book really needed an editor. It's just some random neckbeard rambling about his zombie fantasy. It's worse than the first book. Why do so many people like these books? I don't get it. ( )

I was at about 50/50 whether I was going to finish this due to several annoyances, some of which were present in the first book and are not just present in this book but intensely magnified. In preparation for this review, I began to write out the grievances so I could remember and thoroughly explain my thoughts when I finished the book; however, it was in writing all that out that I decided to abandon this book immediately.

I honestly don't know that I've ever been more torn about a protagonist in any other book I've ever read. I constantly went between respecting Mike and then wishing he would just be eaten by the zombies already. I have decided that I wish the latter, and here's why:

**minor spoilers**

- Grotesque and morbidly fascinating descriptions of zombie gore, I can handle. I can even handle the explorations of the darker side of humanity with the serial rapist from the first book. What I can't handle are the numerous, lengthy, and detailed descriptions of bodily functions that litter this book. Every ten pages Mike is crapping his pants or farting or peeing on himself or getting covered in his own rope-y snot, then he has paragraphs-long internal dialog about it all. This happened in the first book a lot, too, but I mostly overlooked it. I can't overlook it anymore. If these sections were taken out of the book, I would not be surprised if it were 50 pages shorter. I began to feel like they were only added in to create length because they certainly don't generate any value for the actual storyline. Seriously, how often can one crap or pee their pants or fart or have their sinuses dump themselves and, even if one does, how many times can one philosophize about it? I get that maybe things like that might happen in a situation like this when people are scared out of their wits and their bodies are under stress, but that often? And why dwell on it in excruciating detail like that? Just... yuck. I also find it unbelievable that he and his wife have been married so long, yet somehow deny that the other has bodily functions and are afraid to fart in front of each other or things like that. Really? Maybe that denial is why Mike spends so much time thinking about it all, and I guess it would make sense given how awkward their marriage seems to be (more on that later).

- The painfully drawn-out comedy of errors that was the sheriff's office incident was basically when I lost all respect for Mike as a hero and everyone else in his party because they continued to look to him for guidance. I almost stopped reading right then, but decided to give it another chance. I gave up when they got to the motel because I could tell by the way Mike was patting himself on the back about how they'd all coalesced into a group that thinks ahead and plans together that the motel would just be yet another string of bad decisions that would be painful to get out of and make me further lose respect for him and everyone else in his party. By this time, I had learned that any time he was self-congratulatory like that, his thoughts were quickly disproved by their actions. I began to wish that the book was following Alex and his family and April instead of Mike's family.

- The weird relationship Mike has with his wife where he demonizes her in one breath but then praises her in the other became caustic for me, as did her contradictory statements and feelings about him. I get that maybe this is supposed to reflect the complicated feelings we might have about our significant others on some level in real life, but I could no longer overlook it because it got to a point where I just didn't understand why they were even pretending to be a couple any longer, which then basically made all the internal dialogue Mike had about saving his "family" and how important she is to him come off as lies (both to himself and to the reader). It was confusing and distracting.

- Mike keeps talking about how he has "prepared" his sons for this kind of thing and he's so proud of that, but he didn't seem to value teaching any of the women in his life how to shoot a gun or defend themselves?? I just don't get it. Even if you feel that guns are a "man's territory" under normal circumstances, why wouldn't you make sure EVERYONE IN YOUR PARTY can load each kind of firearm available and shoot with some accuracy to protect the party as a whole?? It's naive to think that somehow all the men are going to survive this whole thing. What are the women supposed to do if they find themselves alone because all the men have died protecting them? We already saw how well that worked out in the gas station with Mike's wife and daughter when they stupidly went off on their own and had no idea how to load or use the firearm they for some reason brought with them--and that even after all that they they still didn't ask to be given education in this area!! Seriously?? They were seconds away from death because they didn't understand how to use the tool that could have easily saved them, yet it didn't occur to them to ask to learn how to use said tool once they returned to the relative safety of the housing compound. It's one thing to be uninterested or "not believe" in guns before all this; it's another be uninterested and play the damsel in distress with no way to protect yourself during an actual apocalypse. There is just no excuse for any of this. If the women did show interest it was in a comic relief way. Sometimes it was when the women were alone for the reader's benefit (like the gas station incident), and other times it was right in front of the men (like when Erin was ineptly trying to fend off zombies during the rescue with Paul and had no skill whatsoever) and instead of trying to educate them, the men were like, "Haha, women trying to use those things is so cute, of course they don't know what they're doing because they're women." Really? How is this even along the lines of Mike's past and personality? Would a military person really sit there while that lack of education actually makes them more dangerous to the living (particularly with children in their party) and completely ineffective where protection is concerned? So, apparently all women don't have a clue about firearms by dint of being a woman and that is funny (uh, sorry, but no one has a clue about them, man or woman, until they are formally educated about them), women aren't worth teaching these skills even in emergency situations, and the women don't view themselves as worth educating because men are around to protect them. All of this was so inane I just couldn't get over it. Seriously, in an actual zombie apocalypse, clinging to gender assignments with the whole man-protects-woman thing or the fear of tools like that even to the detriment of your party is completely ludicrous. (And, in case you're wondering, I practice what I preach here, as I have been educated about firearms.)

- Why are they putting up with Justin, who has so obviously turned to the dark side?? This is also completely ludicrous, particularly when you consider that Tommy must know what's going on with him. I get that Justin is Mike's son, but he is CLEARLY A THREAT to them, he has done nothing to earn his place with them in a long time, the way Mike is touted in this book you would think he'd maybe figure out that Justin may not be as weak as he is pretending AND that Justin is probably how the baddies who are targeting them are finding them so easily, and Justin has on more than one occasion made his malice toward Mike plain. Like April, I would've gone with Alex, if nothing else to get away from creepy Justin. Or at the very least blindfold Justin and plug his ears or something to try to stop him from giving the baddies information.

- It's like the TV show "Lost" where they kept adding more and more mysteries and unexplained things and we just had to accept them episode after episode as they compounded. There's Tommy's spirit guide and psychic abilities. There's Eliza the vampire and/or some other male baddie who is stalking Mike and have some sort of vendetta against him. There's Justin (also a vampire now?). There's zombies. Oh but wait there are two kinds of zombies now, some that seem to be from the original H1N1 problem and now some that are also vampires? There's telepathy. There's psychic abilities. I mean, for God's sake. Enough already. I am still mildly curious about what all this means, but rather than torture myself with the rest of these books, I will probably just go read spoilers in other reviews so the mystery will be solved and I am sparing myself from Mike's behavior. ( )