Unlike most horror fans, it seems, I in fact do NOT like a good zombie story.  As far as I’m concerned, a “good” zombie story is about as rare as a good country song.  But I do have to admit, every so often you run across an album like The Wreckers, and you start to re-evaluate your stance.  Same thing happened for me with Travis Adkins’ novel After Twilight: Walking with the Dead, from Permuted Press.

I’ve read a couple other PP books, and wasn’t exactly impressed with either of them, and when I realized After Twilight was a sequel to an earlier book (2007’s Twilight of the Dead), I was even less eager to read it.  How much of the story was I missing?  But more than that, was I about to read another crappy zombie novel from another self-important small press writer who thinks, just because he had a second zombie novel published, that he’s something special?  Oh boy, I thought.

And then before I knew it I was 33 pages in the first day and couldn’t stop reading.  I read as I cooked dinner.  I got up early the next morning and kept reading until I hit the halfway mark.  Then I got up early the third day and finished it in one sitting.  Adkins’ novel isn’t rewriting history here, nor has he discovered the missing ingredient or the unique spin to make all future zombie novels a work of genius.  Truth be told, the zombies in Travis Adkins’ book are there because the situation demands the characters be in some sort of peril.  But in reality, After Twilight (and I would like to assume the first novel in the series as well, although I’ve not read it) isn’t about the zombies at all.  See, of all the zombie stories I’ve ever read in my entire life, only Travis Adkins was paying attention when he first saw Night of the Living Dead.  He realized, it’s not about the undead trying to get to the living, it’s about the living, and how they interact with one another.  After Twilight isn’t a novel about zombies attacking the living--although there is plenty of that--it’s about the characters.  And it’s pretty damn good!

After Twilight begins 5 years into the zombie apocalypse in the walled community of Eastpointe, RI.  Our characters have a good life, they’ve re-established their society, everyone has jobs, they make money, and they’re happy.  At the novel’s start, the town marshal, Tyrell, learns of a mission their resident zombie hunters, the Black Berets, had undertaken the night before, and that the team hasn’t returned.  The town Superintendent wants Ty to go after them, but he refuses.  His job is to maintain the town, to keep the zombies from getting in.

Cut to: Wakefield, where the survivors of that mission have wound up.  Leon Wolfe and Courtney Colvin are stranded on a rooftop.  Leon’s been bitten, but was injected with what they believe is a cure for the zombie infection.  Meanwhile, fellow team member Vaughn Winters wakes up on the cruiseliner which I believe was the setting of the climax of the first novel as going to get this antitoxin was their mission and the plot of the first book.  Vaughn’s been operated on, he wakes with staples in his neck, and he escapes the ship and is able to make his way back to Eastpointe, just barely; the zombies are following him and end up outside the gate by the hundreds.

Leon and Courtney manage to make it back as well, and learn the antitoxin Leon had been injected with did indeed work.

And this is where things start to crumble.  Over the course of the novel, we’ve learned a whole lot about Vaughn Winters, who he was before the zombies, who he’s become since the zombies, and at this point, he has nothing left to lose but his mind, and you really can’t blame the guy when that goes, too.

The citizens of Eastpointe are about to have a Fourth of July celebration they’ll never forget.

I really dug this book.  I was afraid it would be one that took me a week or two to finish, just because it was so boring and badly written, but I zipped through it pretty quickly, and that’s all on Travis Adkins.  He wrote some interesting characters, fleshed them out, and made them so much more than just another gang of two-dimensional cut-outs.  Vaughn’s not exactly the most original in the world--an up-and-coming rock singer on the verge of stardom when the plague strikes, Adkins may as well have just called him Larry Underwood and been done with it--but we go far enough into his personality and his past that what he did for a living at the outset becomes secondary to who he truly is.  In fact, I got so into the character, I was disappointed when his turning point came and I lost that character I’d come to like.

While he knows how to focus his story on the important things, I do have to give Adkins grief for his prose.  The first 30 pages read, to me, like he was trying too hard to emulate King [“It was manufactured to spray pesticide (the ORKIN logo had not yet entirely faded) but it worked fine with kerosene, too.”] but once that influence wore off, his true voice just got clunky.

“He gathered George’s reins in his left hand, placed his left foot in the left stirrup, grabbed the saddle with his right hand, and used the stirrup as leverage to spring up from the ground and swing his right leg over.”

Sheesh.  And the dialogue was, at times, even worse.

“They’ll regret this,” Creyton went on.  “I don’t care if they are dead.  I’ll MAKE them regret it.  I’ll find a way to make them feel pain and I’ll make ‘em feel it in fckng SPADES.  They’ll pay.  They’ll ALL pay.”

DUN-DUN-DUNNNNNNN.  Whatever, dude.  And finally, he gives us a lesson in, well, something I think is pretty obvious anyway:

“Nonetheless, he forced his cold, bare feet to press forward.  First his left foot, which he lifted up and placed in front of him.  Then his right, which he placed in front of his left.  He repeated this cycle even though he had no idea if, in the end, it would accomplish anything at all.”

Well, sure it will; it’s a little something normal people call WALKING.  Unfortunately, I can’t even complain too much about the clumsy prose because that clumsy prose did keep me reading.  No, that’s not true, I read this story despite the clumsy prose.  Because Adkins gave me a good STORY.  That’s the important thing here.  I can overlook that it was a zombie story because, in the end, After Twilight could have been a story about ANY kind of menace, really.  It could have been rabid dogs outside that gate.  Could have been giant mutant crabs.  The threat the people of Eastpointe faced outside their gates isn’t nearly as important as the one they faced inside, and that’s where Adkins chose to focus his attention, and that was exactly the right thing to do because it made his novel stand out from all the other zombie stories.  Good characters dealing with their situation to the best of their ability, growing, changing with the world around them, that’s what Adkins delivered, and I thank him for it because he’s not only renewed my faith in zombie novels, but in Permuted Press as well, which is good, because I currently have two more PP zombie books to read.  With After Twilight: Walking with the Dead under my belt, I’m no longer afraid to read those.  Looking forward to them, actually.

Recommended: Yes