Anyone read it?
It's a short-story anthology that comes together to form a bigger narrative. All short stories are in the form of some kind of physical writing or digital media. Transcripts from interviews, e-mail conversations and diary entries.
The plot is pretty straightforward; the world economy is pretty much in the shit, and the UK is struggling to keep it's populace happy. They plan to arrange a big, brand new "New Festival of Britain" set in London, which will essentially be a week long propaganda festival, praising all things British. But something goes wrong in the preparing of the festival as a massgrave from the 17th century is upturned and it's inhabitants let loose.
I just finished it and I'm a bit disappointed. It's been getting great reviews all across and the idea of it was great. But it takes like a third of the book for it to just "get going" (the first third of the book lays out a very detailed and well researched background to the outbreak) and the ending is abrupt and not very satisfying at all. There's very little explanation towards the end, when you'd expect a lot of the questions that were asked on the way to be answered.
Some great stories and neat ideas. But about two thirds in, the book tries to take the step into the global arena, and that's where it goes kind of dull. The book just can't deliver what World War Z could. Things get unhinged. We get to read yet another persons account of their first encounter with the dead (this time in Australia), even though we've already read plenty of those a few hundred pages earlier when the plague initially hit England.
So it's a bit repetetive. And again, the ending is really a let down.
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Originally Posted by EvilNed
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