Double Dead‘ was wonderful. It was great fun from the first page to the last. It was original, energetic, surprising and often funny. 

I was hooked by the cover and by the idea of a vampire waking from a long sleep to find that the zombie apocalypse has happened while he was dormant. This has dramatically reduced his food supply, forcing him to turn from predator to shepherd, protecting the humans from the zombies.

I thought that that was a strong enough idea to sustain an entire novel but Chuck Wendig went much further and made the novel even better by delivering a plot that had lots of twists and some surprising and ingenious connections that kept placing our vampire at the centre of the action. 

What really made the novel for me was the character of Coburn, the vampire. Most of the story is told from his robustly cynical point of view and is all the better for it. Coburn is not a glamorous vampire. He’s not haunted by being undead. He doesn’t sparkle in sunlight. In his own mind, he is THE apex predator and he’ll kill anyone who thinks differently. I loved watching this grumpy, misanthropic, hedonistic killer adjust to the fact that, from his point of view, the world has turned overnight from an endless buffet of easy eating and decadent living in his Manhattan apartment to somewhere where food is scarce and some of the zombie hoard see HIM as prey. Coburn is irrepressible and probably irredeemable and yet I found myself cheering him on as he cut a swathe through the landscape.

I love the muscular snark of Chuck Wendig’s prose. It speaks to Coburn’s character but also gives a particular tint to the world-building. Yes, Coburn is an unsentimental pragmatist (at least, that’s what he keeps telling himself) but he’s also bright and curious and has a well-developed sense of the absurd. 

Parts of this story are gory, very gory, but not in a repulsive, look-at-that-cool-blood-splatter sort of way. The gore comes from a mix of human cruelty and from the bloody consequences of an almost indestructible vampire fighting through an almost overwhelming zombie hoard that seems to be getting smarter with each encounter. I think I accepted the gore rather than being repulsed by it because everything Coburn does, no matter how unpleasant, feels natural. He’s just a predator being a predator (except when his nature surprises him and he does something selfless that he immediately regrets) so his actions seem OK. He doesn’t glory in the gore and doesn’t go looking for it. He just refuses to lose and he’ll rip anyone apart who tries to make him into a loser. 

Coburn isn’t the only strong character in the book. There are some truly scary baddies and a couple of nice people that you hope will survive but you know that they probably won’t because that’s what happens to nice people in a zombie apocalypse.

I bought ‘Double Dead‘ as part of an audiobook bundle that includes ‘Bad Blood‘ a sequel that Chuck Wendig wrote five years later. Both books are narrated by T. Ryder Smith who does a wonderful job of bringing the book alive. 

After I’ve read ‘Bad Blood‘, I’ll be looking for more books by Chuck Wendig. I’ll probably start with his lastest book, ‘Black River Orchard‘

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