The night comes, and when the sun rises again it rises over a motionless desert, over streets full of rusty, broken-down automobiles, over tumbleweed towns filled with derelict buildings, signposts twisted and bent so that their arrows become nonsensical, pointing into the dirt or up into the sky, billboards whose sunny images and colorful words flap unglued in the breeze, shop windows caked with the grime of decades, bicycles with flat tires abandoned in the middle of intersections, their wheels turning slowly like impotent tin windmills, some buildings charred and burnt out, others half fallen down, multistory tenements split down the middle, standing like shoebox dioramas, pictures still hanging on the upright walls, televisions still in place on their stands teetering over the gaping edge of the floor where the rest of the living room has collapsed to the ground in great mountains of concrete and dust and girder like the abandoned toys of a giant child.
Set in a post-apocalyptic time, it’s never mentioned how people started turning, just that they did. Temple is the illiterate young heroine of the story that follows her on adventures in a world that she was born into. She never knew the world before, where meatskins and slugs didn't patrol the streets to attack and devour any living things they come into contact with. Seeing the world through the eyes of 16 year old is nothing knew but Temple has seen things and done things even she can’t comprehend. She journeys through American states coming across desirables and undesirables. The story is crafted with punctuation but is lacking speech marks which adds another unknown element into the story. Sometimes I found myself doubling back just so I had it clear in my head who said what and if it were out loud or in her head. She meets some interesting people and we get a peek into how different circumstances lead people to face hard times in different ways. Some people aid strangers whereas other people are always out for themselves, following their own set of rules or reclaiming something they felt was owed to them from another lifetime. Temple is coming to grips with being a monster while also not realising she acts like an angel. The story gets even weirder when she rescues a man (who she refers to as Dummy) that she passes in her car, being chased by a horde while carrying his expired granny. Very rarely does a tale full of zombies not also come hand in hand with gore. Although not extremely graphic, this book has its fair share of shocks and horrors. In spite of that, I found the ending a tad heart breaking. It made sense and fitted in with the story well, but I was still gutted after growing to know and love several of the characters.
If you enjoy the post-apocalyptic/zombie movies/stories then I would definitely recommend you give this book a read.
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