Review: A mixed bag
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 21, 2014
This is an anthology with plenty of meat - one of the largest collections of zombie stories I have read to date. I found it to be a mixed bag of authors with varying degrees of skill. The quality of the editing was inconsistent; some stories were flawless while others needed more polishing. It was apparent that the stories had been edited individually by different parties, but it would have been a better read if the entire book had been run through by one editor prior to publication. Some were stand-alone stories, and some were just excerpts of novels, which was a disappointment.The formatting left a lot to be desired as well. The Table of Contents did not list each individual story, which made the book difficult to navigate. I know a lot of authors elect to use chapter numbers instead of names, but in this case, each story has a title so there's no reason not to show the title in the link. Not having a list of contents to refer to made it difficult to remember which stories I really liked so I could mention them in this review.In spite of the glitches, I found most of the stories entertaining, with a few memorable favorites.Of the stand-alone stories, my favorite was, "You'll  Never Be Lunch in This Town Again" (I can't remember the author's name, and because of the aforementioned navigation problems it was too much trouble to look for the story again to find out)Shannon Mayer's "Sundered" was an enticing introduction to her Nevermore trilogy. I loved Mayer's unique twist on the 'zombie' apocalypse and the fact that the story is set on Vancouver Island, just a stone's throw from where I live.