by John Russo
Kensington, 2013
I've seen this referred to as the novelization of the 2006 comic. It isn't. I think this is a long unpublished third installment to Night and Return of the Living of the Living Dead, partly updated to 2013ish. It's set 16 years after the original outbreak (or an original outbreak - the book isn't explicitly a sequel) so I'm guessing it was originally set circa 1985, but Russo puts more effort into updating this one than some of the other that he's recently reissued.
A scientist bit during the original outbreak manages to survive and gives birth to a couple of vampire girls. They use hired thugs to kidnap victims to experiment on, and when the police close in on them, a truckload of zombies (he uses the Z word) escapes.
I enjoy Russo's rambling plotlines, but other readers may be less charitable. The hero of our story gets written out early, major characters get killed off page, but if you think of it as more of a Slacker or Twenty Bucks with zombies, it goes better.
Some criminals save a Catholic school, and some Aryan Brotherhood hoodlums hole up in a bar. It's decidedly small scale, and it implies that in the Russo-verse, Night of the Living Dead was a localized outbreak quickly contained.
It's packaged with the superior Midnight and way too expensive as of this writing.
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