The Girl With All The Gifts by M. R. Carey (4 stars)

This book has an interesting early reveal that if you come to the book in just the right way, i.e. without reading anything at all about it, is probably worth preserving. So I'm putting the spoiler warning right up front, since it's impossible to talk about otherwise. Consider yourself warned.

Having said that, I knew it was a zombie book before I started reading. I think it's actually very obvious before the reveal, but it's hard to judge that objectively. The start of the book is very strong. The idea of high-functioning zombie children being studied for clues to help a mostly-annihilated human population survive in the post-apocalyptic world is very novel. It feels more like a government-gone-crazy dystopia novel to begin with, especially as Melanie notices lots of little cracks appearing in the facade that the teachers and Sergeant Parks present.

After the Junkers storm the base in a brilliantly conceived attack, everything changes. The novel switches to Walking Dead mode, where survival means defending against attacks from both humans and zombies. This is definitely entertaining, and Melanie's encounter with a partially conscious zombie sitting on a bed, singing and leafing through photos is one of the creepier things I've ever read.

"The raven... croaked... as she sat... at her meal..."

It's so apposite to her thoughts, Caldwell is thrown for a moment. But he's not answering her, he's only singing the last line of the quatrain. She knows the song, vaguely. It's "The Woman Who Rode Double", an old folk ballad as depressing and interminable as most of its type - exactly the sort of song she'd expect a hungry to sing.

Except that they don't. Ever.

But the story seems to start losing its way, especially after entering London. Dr Caldwell goes somewhat nuts, and the madcap adventure with the armored vehicle bordered on slapstick with the car careening around through buildings with zombies attached. I get that this was supposed to be the last desperate actions of a species on the brink of extinction, but by this stage I felt like the book had lost almost all of its early promise.

The ending was fitting I think, and I liked the use of an actual zombie fungus as the basis for the infection. Overall there are great ideas here, the execution just wasn't that strong.

4 stars.

Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon (3.5 stars)

My first goodreads recommendation, it was certainly on-target with the post-apocalyptic genre, one of my favourites. The obvious comparison for Swan Song is with Stephen King's The Stand. On the face of it there are a number of similarities: there's an apocalypse and the survivors are caught up in a good versus evil struggle with a fantasy component, i.e. the devil has a real physical form and people are drawn to each other through dreams. Good and evil population centres form and come into conflict.

But there's lots of differences too. Swan Song is much more of an action/horror book, with modest effort spent on building characters, paling in comparison to the masterful character construction in The Stand.  It is also almost purely post-apocalyptic, not much time is spent before the apocalypse, and because it's nuclear the apocalypse itself plays out very quickly, in stark contrast to The Stand where both of those phases are very long.

Swan Song draws inspiration from TS Eliot's The Waste Land and quotes from it are used extensively throughout the book, including as the password prompts for the nuclear launch.  (Incidentally, using a well-known poem verbatim as challenge-response is a terrible choice of authentication strategy).

Minor spoilers ahead.

McCammon's devil is fairly supernaturally creepy in the early stages of the book as he sits in an untouched theatre in NYC amidst the nuclear wasteland, and during his first encounter with Sister Creep.  Later in the novel though he seems impotent when confronting Swan, for seemingly little reason.  Her ability to wield "forgiveness" had a deus ex machina smell to it.

On at least a couple of occasions this book crossed my gore and horror threshold.  This is when I stop enjoying the other-worldness and thought experiment of survival after an apocalypse, and start wondering why I'm reading about babies getting clubbed to death to assert a warlord's evil-ness.

Sans these sections I thought the evil side was fairly well imagined.  I liked the image of the people living in holes surrounding the camps with lights and guns, picking off survivors as they are attracted to the lights of the settlement.  Lord Alvin of the K-Mart was pretty well-done too, very Mad Max.

The character development was fairly weak, and we don't get a deep feeling of being inside the head of any character, but I have to give McCammon some credit.  He certainly picked interesting character trajectories.  A homeless lady turns into a strong township leader, and a teenager, Roland, gradually reveals a mad and utterly ruthless appetite for survival at all costs.

There's a few cringe-worthy moments, e.g. when Sister Creep is saved from a pack of wolves, not once, but twice, under increasingly improbable circumstances.  And Macklin's whole shadow-soldier business.  It should have been really creepy, but instead it just felt going through the motions to apply the obvious stereotype for a post-apocalyptic warlord: psychologically unstable war vet.

He blinked.  The Shadow Soldier was smiling thinly, his face streaked with camouflage paint under the brow of his helmet.

The other similarity this book shares with The Stand, is that the ending is pretty poor.  All of the supernatural struggle is cast aside for a very real, very improbable, and fairly Matthew Reilly action sequence (it even involves a bunker).  After which everything is pretty much fine and things are looking great for the human race.  *sigh*.

Definitely a page-turner, post-apocalyptic fans who were bored with the pace of The Stand with a high tolerance for gore would find lots to like.

3.5 stars.