Empire is a zombie novel by author and short story writer David Dunwoody. The book takes place, as many zombie novels do, in post-apocalyptic America. The zombie plague has been around for a hundred years or so, and much of the United States has been overrun and is now considered "badlands." The book chronicles the adventures of residents of Jefferson Harbor, Louisiana, struggling to eke out a day-to-day existence and fight off the ever-growing legions of shambling undead.
Where the book strays from the typical zombie novel plot is the addition of one more character: Death. Death, or the Grim Reaper, has come to Jefferson Harbor to slay zombies, whose very existence is an affront to everything he knows.
The book has its pros and cons, but Dunwoody's treatment and personification of Death is nicely done. The concept alone deserves recognition, and Dunwoody handles it very well. The Grim Reaper enters the story to collect a dying man's soul and slice a zombie in half, and over the course of the book develops into a full-fledged character.
At under 300 pages, Empire is a short novel that doesn't waste much space with unimportant details or unnecessary info dumps. The book starts out with a letter written by a soldier, used as exposition for the reader. While most of the information in the letter helps to set the scene, it reads a little awkwardly at times, and could easily have been cut in half without much loss to the story.
Zombies have been done to death (no pun intended) in books and movies lately, and Dunwoody makes every effort to separate Empire from the pack. He even introduces new slang to replace the over-used terms "zombie" and "undead," which for many readers may come as a welcome change.
Dunwoody is clearly a talented writer, and his action scenes are intense and well-described. There are many typos throughout the book, especially in the latter half, that over time tend to draw the reader out of the story (which is never a good thing). The book's main fault is its ambition: so many characters come and go that it is hard to keep track of them all. More than once as I started a new chapter I found myself trying to remember who the character being mentioned was.
The problems I had with Empire were minor (and mostly technical issues). The author's character-oriented style and superior storytelling ability make this book stand out from the horde of other zombie novels on the market. I would heartily recommend Empire to any fan of apocalyptic horror, or horror in general.
The 2010 edition currently available from Amazon ($11.48), Bookshop ($19.99) and others is a newer edition than the one I read. It may be slightly different (and hopefully fixed the typos).
At the time of this review, the author was working with the publisher on a sequel.
(Originally posted on Helium.com 3/22/09)
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