State of Decay

Author: James Knapp
Goodreads Rating: 3.68/5
Pages: 384

Just because you're dead doesn't mean you're useless...
A thrilling debut novel of a dystopian future populated by a new breed of zombie
They call them revivors-technologically reanimated corpses-and away from the public eye they do humanity's dirtiest work. But FBI agent Nico Wachalowski has stumbled upon a conspiracy involving revivors being custom made to kill-and a startling truth about the existence of these undead slaves.

So this was an interesting read. There was a lot of interesting things, but some things were confusing.

First of all, this was a fascinating take on the whole zombies thing. It talks about these things called "revivors", which are reanimated people (aka zombies) but they are more like trained zombies. They don't go around eating human flesh. No, in this almost dystopian world, the government uses these revivors for all sorts of things, from war soldiers to hookers (yea that part was a little awkward but I guess whatever floats your boat). They have these devices in them that make them almost like AI robots that keep them from eating people. They also have memories and can talk and are pretty much like stronger, fast humans that can't really die easily.

Going off that, this futuristic world has some awesome technology! The bioelectronics they talk about technology where you can see text in your vision and record and take pictures of what you see! It's like having a smart phone in your head! (minus the phone calls... they still have phones for that.)

I also liked the writing style. The book focuses on 4 characters and there are sections for each of them where they talk in the first person. I haven't really seen this kind of style before so it was pretty interesting.

However cool this book was it was pretty confusing for some parts. The writing style made it a little hard to keep track of the story since you had to keep track of it from multiple perspectives. One perspective apparently had nothing to do with the others for a while. It comes together in the end, which was interesting but up until that point, it's a little out there.

I also had to figure out exactly what the revivors were and it took me a while. Since I thought "Oh revivors are just zombies" I wasn't expecting them to be actually used by the government for purposes like war. Plus, didn't expect them to have the ability to talk... that through me off for some reason. Like I said before, it's an interesting concept and twist to the zombie theme, but took me a bit to figure out that they are like AI zombies.

A downfall to the technology use is the author really didn't explain how it worked a lot. Characters would say they used one of these bioelectronic things but not really explain what it does so you sometimes have to kind of figure it out. This didn't happen often (maybe like once or twice) but still was annoying since I'm trying to figure out the story, I don't really want to have to figure out what this bioelectronic doo-hikey does.

Finally, I didn't know this book was part of a series when I bought it, but it is a good opening to the other books. It was a good book overall, but the confusion in it brought this book down to 3 stars. It's an interesting Sci-Fi plot, with a great twist in the zombies (and also another element I won't spoil, which connects all the perspectives in the end) but it didn't leave me craving for the next book sadly. I think this is mostly due to the confusion in the book.

The Courts Decision: