My reading time has been down as of late. Between a full time job, keeping Buy Zombie running, expanding the site, what we’re doing, writing, well let’s just say it’s been hard on keeping books read. I used to read a book every two days and now it’s lucky if I read a book every 2 weeks. So I’m extremely happy that I had time to sit down and read the Permuted Press re-issue of Timothy W. Long’s Among the Living.

To be fair I should say here that I’ve been talking to Tim online for a couple years now. We’re not “friends” in the – we don’t go around golfing on weekends (I don’t golf and I don’t think he does either) but we tend to get along when we talk (mutual enjoyment of zombies and whatnot.) So that being said even if we were best buds and hung out on a daily basis if I thought something he wrote was a steaming pile of crap I would say so. That is quite fortunately NOT the case here. Not even close! Among the Living went from a book I had on the backburner to read since I know the author and have a huge pile to go through to become one of my favorite zombie novels. Don’t make the mistake on putting off reading it!

It’s the first book in what I hope will be an extended series. We are introduced to a cast from all areas of life. Some of whom live and some of whom, quite fittingly in a zombie novel, die. We are injected into the world right at patient zero. A hope to cure a disease is tested before it’s fully ready to attempt to save a life. The cure didn’t have its intended effect though and an outbreak was almost instantaneous. Our initial characters are instantly gone and therefore this is just a reason on why there is an outbreak. It’s a solid reason with why there are zombies and not one that has to be touched again.

Quickly we are moved through our main groups of characters – a couple of reporters who have fallen in love, a drug dealer and his girlfriend, a death metal singer, and a serial killer. While these are the primary focus there are a multitude of backup characters that are also thrown in to both live and die as the novel progresses – though they do all have their roles to play. As much as I’d love to go on about these characters it’d be hard to do so without too many spoilers. What I can say is that they are all believable. From main characters to supporting backups you really can feel for their situations. Even those who don’t react how you think you would or would want someone to – their reactions are believable.

I have to say that as we are thrown in right as the zombie outbreak happens I love how Tim writes in a way that we can see people who are at the main outbreak area and have to deal with zombies while they have no idea what’s going on as well as see people who find out ‘something’ is happening but are thrown into the mix a little later. As the media is of course blacked out, everyone coming into the mess late doesn’t realize what is actually going on. Some of our characters are dealing with the zombies nearly right away and some aren’t until half way into the novel.

It’s a mix of survival and gore as our main characters try to have just one more day among the dead and the living.

Available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.