An easy writing style and a familiar plot line combine themselves to create a fast-paced typical post-apocalyptic zombie outbreak survival story in Patrick D’Orazio’s book, Comes the Dark. From start to finish, D’Orazio keeps the reader on the edge of their seat with suspense, heart break, despair, to a glimmer of hope in the typical survivor story. The characters are original, along with the specific plot points, but as a whole, how many times can the story line really be re-written to sound original? Survivor loses family and friends, gives up on living, finds reason to fight against the odds to continue on in a broken zombie riddled world, and against all odds, finds other like-minded survivors.
When the reader first meets Jeff, they see the adrenaline packed, if not typical survivalist scene. Running from zombies while trying to make it back to his family, Jeff eventually finds that his world has been violently ripped away from him all for a meager backpack of food. This installment of the trilogy encompasses two heart-pounding, chaotic, edge of your seat days. The words on the page make you feel as though you’re running next to Jeff and are just another member of his rag-tag group of survivors that he slowly picks up one by one. From the hair-raising encounters with the horde to fast thinking to get out of sticky situations with fellow survivors alive, D’Orazio keeps readers engaged through the whole book.
However expected the story line may be, the specific encounters and plot points are all individual and highly unique. D’Orazio gives the reader just enough of a back-story on each character to make them feel like one of those unfortunate souls that’s been thrown into the thick of things together, really only knowing your own backstory and bits and pieces of what the other members of your band of stragglers are willing to tell you. Included as an additional read, added after the original story, the reader has a chance to get more intimately acquainted to each person’s plight. The author warns before embarking on the extra nuggets that reading may change the initial views held by readers of the characters. He puts it in your hands, do you, dear reader, want to know these people as if you had lived alongside them before the unfortunate turn of events that led them to where they were when being pushed together, or do you want to keep that air of mystery and let the story and events unfold along the same path as the rest of the inhabitants of the pages of Comes the Dark.
Available on Amazon.
