If you think the zombie genre is played out, you clearly haven’t walked the streets of post-apocalyptic London with Charlie Higson.
The setup is terrifyingly simple. A sickness has swept across the globe, but it doesn't kill you. It turns everyone over the age of 16 into drooling, predatory "mothers" and "fathers"—rotting corpses with a singular hunger for the flesh of the young.
This is a YA book, but Higson pulls no punches. Major characters die. Good people make bad decisions. The stakes feel incredibly real. The audiobook format makes the emotional beats hit harder; when a character you love is in danger, the narrator’s tension becomes your tension.
With the adults gone (or rather, turned into monsters), the kids are left to fend for themselves. We follow a group of survivors holed up in a Waitrose supermarket in London. They have food, they have makeshift weapons, but they are running out of luck. When a stranger arrives promising safety at the Buckingham Palace, they embark on a suicide mission across a city overrun by the dead.
If you’d like a longer sample or a specific scene described (like the opening chase or the Waitrose battle), let me know.
