Rot & ruin is what everyone calls the world outside of Mountainside. Mountainside is a protected village walled off from the world of the dead to protect the remaining living. Benny Imura is just trying to get by in life and trying to keep his food rations coming despite turning fifteen, the point at which not having a job would result in no food. Benny doesn’t really want to work at all, but he wants to keep eating. Benny’s brother Tom is a zombie hunter and wants Benny to join him in the family business. Their parents died during the zombie outbreak and Benny has little memory of that night. What Benny remembers about that night is that his brother was a coward because he took Benny and ran leaving their parents behind. When Benny fails to find a job that he wants to do, he agrees to join his brother on a trip out into the Rot & Ruin, a trip that will change the way he sees his brother and the way that he views his own life.
This book is not what I expected it to be. I guess I was expecting a slash and gash zombie flick special with a cover as intense as this book has. This book has its fair share of zombies but it isn’t about zombies as much as it’s about family, death, loss, life, and justice. There are some great moments that caused me to reflect on how we look at things like life and death and good and evil. Sometimes the way we see things is all about the perspective we are seeing it from, and sometimes a change in perspective can change you so much that you can’t see life the same way again. Taking the journey with Benny and Tom out into the Rot & Ruin is a journey worth taking and I would recommend it for even the non-zombie fan (I mean, zombies will obviously love it so no need to make a recommendation there). To all the zombie fans out there, shamble over to the book store or the library because this is a zombie book that you will want to add to your collection. In the words of the famous zombie uuuuuguguuuuh (that roughly translates to, “you need to read this book because we zombies don’t get the respect that we deserve and this book offers the change in perspective that you might need to understand where we are coming from). *
*This review is sponsored by PETZ (People for the Ethical Treatment of Zombies). The book and the author of the book are in no way directly affiliated with this organization (or lack there of) nor is this review the result of payment by the organization to the author of the blog (seeing as the organization lacks the funding to pay anyone properly because they are spending the majority of their budget trying to keep our shuffling, rotting flesh, walking corpse buddies from busting out on the general population).
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