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Readers’ reception to this postapocalyptic thriller, sequel to the author’s Vacation (2011), will probably depend on their expectations. The story picks up where Vacation left off: the Murphy family, having gone to a camp that’s protected against the Can Heads—much of the human race was rather inexplicably turned, a couple of years ago, into cannibalistic creatures—found that the camp wasn’t what it seemed. Christie Murphy has only one thing in mind: get her two children back home, to their fortified house on Staten Island. The book is a neat twist on the zombie theme, and the story moves at a brisk clip, with plenty of mayhem. But it reads like a screenplay in prose form. Paragraphs are extremely short, dialogue is brief and rarely consists of more than a few sentences, and character development takes a backseat to action. The Can Heads themselves are only superficially explored, except for a few tantalizing hints that will, presumably, be explored in the next book. A sharp contrast to some of the thoughtful, more literary explorations of the walking-dead theme—see David Moody’s Autumn series or Colson Whitehead’s Zone One—this is essentially an action movie put into words, and readers who approach it from that angle should be satisfied. --David Pitt