The Unwashed Dead by Ian Woodhead is a tale of survival (or lack thereof) in the opening hours of a zombie apocalypse. It follows a montage of foul-mouthed Brits on “the estate” as an ever-growing horde of zombies and mercenary soldiers seek to end their lives through bite or bullet.
The Good: For fans of amateur zombie fanfic, this story offers more of the same. It isn’t gouge-your-eyes-out awful, but only in comparison to much of the other zombie-themed tripe on offer.
The Bad: The story is riddled with typos. From absent or misplaced quotation marks to run-on sentences to misused and overused semicolons to “Its” not meaning “It’s”, it’s clear that this story didn’t receive even a perfunctory proofread before being submitted for critique. In several cases the typos are bad enough to render the sentences in which they occur into absolute gibberish.
The plot offers nothing any fan of zombie fiction hasn’t seen a thousand times. From unrealistic violence to random murderous characters to military intervention that doesn’t pan out to male characters who meet women and immediately think about boning them, Woodhead plumbs the depths of tired familiarity and presents it unaltered to his readership.
The Ugly: Two-thirds of the very short chapters follow the “introduce character, kill character with zombies” format, and most of the characters die within two pages of their initial appearance. The first three chapters each involve a different character getting attacked by zombies while taking a leak, which made me wonder if the author had some kind of urine-and-death fetish…
By chapter four he gets sidetracked from urination by awful people happy that the apocalypse gives them an excuse to kill things. Some of them die right away, some kill people before meeting their own horrible end, and none participate in anything resembling a plot, but at least they aren’t peeing.
The action is bland and unremarkable, and the few doomed characters that recur are your familiar and forgettable blend of psychopaths and over-their-head nice guys. No attempt whatsoever is made to develop these bland, interchangeable facades to the point that the reader would be bothered to keep track of their names, much less care one whit what happens to any of them.
The Verdict: The Unwashed Dead needs a good wash.
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