Book Review: Rise of the Dead

Rise of the Dead. Jeremy Dyson. Chicago, IL: CreateSpace, March 18, 2016, Trade Paperback, Kindle, and Audible, 250 pages.

Reviewed by Jose Nateras.

From comics to movies to television and yes, even literary fiction, zombies have been a huge part of the cultural zeitgeist for quite some time now. Since George Romero’s iconic 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead, artists and writers have used hordes of the undead as a way to thrill audiences and reflect on issues of societal unease. In Jeremy Dyson’s debut novel, Rise of the Dead, readers are introduced to Blake, a statistician everyman, as he tries to survive the titular apocalyptic events along with a small number of survivors that he happens to come across.

Dyson’s use of the first person, present tense keeps the action engaging and the momentum moving. This choice of perspective keeps things feeling urgent and zipping from moment to moment, nicely conveying the sense of action. At the same time, a result of this writing style is that the novel can sometimes feel like an activity log. The direct, straightforward, stream of consciousness-like descriptions of the world Blake sees and experiences does not provide much room for the character’s impressions or feelings towards these sights and events. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; however, when Blake does get a chance to pause and articulate how he’s been affected by the course of events, it’s a stark enough shift to make his inner life come across like a forced afterthought.

Horror excels when it is able to make its audience feel the fear and dread of its characters as their own. Dyson’s depiction of action and clear descriptions may effectively achieve this goal on their own for some readers. However, exposure to any of the numerous zombie films, comics, fiction, and television shows would leave much of that imagery feeling familiar. As a result, some of the scares are not as effective as they might be given the emotional context of the characters through whose eyes we are seeing them. 

Overall, horror and zombie fans (namely, the target audience for this novel) would find Jeremy Dyson’s Rise of the Dead to be an enjoyable example of iconic genre fare. The novel satisfies the expectations it sets up and really capitalizes on the specificity of its Chicagoland setting. If, overall, Rise of the Dead doesn’t offer anything particularly new or surprising in terms of zombie fiction, Dyson’s choice of setting his apocalyptic zombie attack during a morning commute into the city from the suburbs of Chicago is a smart and original one. 

As Jeremy Dyson’s premier novel, Rise of the Dead is a promising debut. The first book in what is to be a trilogy, Dyson effectively tells an exciting story that lays a strong groundwork for what is yet to come. Its end ultimately offers just the right amount of closure for a reader to walk away satisfied but still expectant for what may happen next. It will be interesting to see how Dyson grows and develops as a writer and what that experience will mean for the subsequent books in the series.