Rise Again Below Zero
Tripp follows his fine debut, Rise Again (2010), with this equally exciting zombie thriller. Danny Adelman has found her missing sister, Kelly, and is once again leading a ragtag group of survivors fleeing from the zeroes (the walking dead, in other words). There are persistent reports of a “safe place,” a place protected from the zeroes, but are these rumors spread by desperate people, or is there some truth here? Tripp expands the postapocalyptic world he created in the first book, exploring in greater detail the nature of the zombies. Like humans, they seem to be divided into classes: moaners, hunters, and thinkers. It’s the last who are called zeroes and appear to be able to communicate, to plan, and to devise traps for their prey. And there’s another kind of zero, too. This might be the first zombie story since George Romero’s Day of the Dead to feature a zombie as a major central character: Danny’s sister, Kelly, is quite dead, but she seems to have held onto the thing that made her human. She may be rotting away, she may be obsessed with the smell of human blood and her near-insatiable appetite, but she’s still Danny’s sister, and together they make one of the oddest pairings you’re likely to find in horror fiction. Can Danny find the (possibly nonexistent) safe place before Kelly finally succumbs to her zombie instincts and begins feasting on her own sister? For fans of zombie fiction, this one’s a sure-fire hit. --David Pitt