Here’s what makes zombies work for me. They are the perfect mixture of two of my favorite subgenres of fiction: horror and global catastrophe. There are bits and pieces of specifics, but that’s the lion’s share of the appeal, right there. The fact is, I get a childlike glee out of both the idea of an empty world and the idea of an unstoppable plague of the undead. One presumes that my actual reaction to such events would be, at the least, more sober and thoughtful. It remains to be seen!

The point of all that being that I’ve found a book that breaks with all previous reader conventions on my part. Xombies is the story of the end of the world at the hands of all women of childbearing age, who all at the same time became blue of skin and started to perform the function for which zombies are second-best known: killing everyone within the reach of their arms and replicating themselves. And it is the story of the aftermath, the struggle for survival of dozens of military men tasked with saving civilization and the hundreds of boys who managed to come along for the ride. And of course it is the story of our narrator, a seventeen year old girl who, thanks to a medical condition, is unable to menstruate and is therefore immune to the initial phase of the disease. (Nobody, of course, is immune to the methods by which it is spread.)

There are layers upon layers of depth to the story. The point that only menstruating women initiated the disease was not lost on me; neither was the bitter irony of the narrator’s surname being Pangloss. Inevitably, I skipped by many of the layers, because, English degree or not, I’m a pretty simple guy at heart, and I mostly wanted to see how the world ended and how our heroes survived it. I’d probably consider going back and reading it again sometime in the near future with an eye on plumbing the depths more fully, except, as I said, it broke my conventions for this genre.

At no point, from the first few chapters through the climax, was I filled with childlike glee at the end of the world. Instead, I was filled with the thick, choking oppression of an actual world’s ending. The sense of things winding down, of people losing purpose and hope hand-in-hand, of the inherently contradictory senselessness of the situation: all of these things accompanied me throughout the book. Having gotten an impression of what the end of the world would really feel like, I find that I prefer my childlike glee. So I probably won’t read it again anytime soon after all. It was good, but not spectacular enough to overcome the unpleasant feeling of reality.