Review: Genre-bending!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 06 5, 2014
Vivia Brisk is a hag: a death witch. She works for the Lipscombe Trust, an ancient company that gives advice and help to supernatural creatures. She has an annoying coworker named Malcolm. When Malcolm dies, he'll be a zombie.Malcolm dies (mysteriously).By law zombies have to be dealt with quickly and locked up before they eat and infect all of London. But Malcolm is rescued by his teenage son, Ben, who is one of the "winged ones", and no one can find them.It's up to Vivia to use her death senses to find him before London turns into Zombieland. But with corpses in Malcolm's backyard, an undead stepfather, a "dead" hag mother and the shell of her dead sister (not to mention the annoying cat-shifter she has to work with), Vivia is in for a deadly time!I'm not usually a fan of zombie stories (with the exception of Darren Shan's Zom-B series). But SW Fairbrother's The Secret Dead is so much more than a zombie tale.It's a story about Vivia, who has more problems than the average hag. There's a sense of personal failurein that she can't bring her sister back properly and never visits her in the underworld.There's also a great deal of mystery. How did Malcolm die? What's going on with the ghosts in his house? Why was there human meat in his refrigerator?This novella works in many ways: horror, dark humor and mystery. Fans of all genres will eat this up (get it? haha) and beg for more.Great crossover story. Will definitely reread over again!5/5--genre-bending!