This weekend, I read Malcolm Devlin’s novella And Then I Woke Up. I thought it was terrific, and I write that as a long time, and very jaded, fan of the zombie genre.

The worst of zombie stories are ones with a zombie apocalypse that does nothing specifically with the zombies. It could have been a nuclear apocalypse or magically electricity no longer worked - and the story would have been exactly the same. Character driven stories within the zombie genre in which the characters are examined typically are where it is the best for me. And Then I Woke Up is one of them. It now sits right next to me other favorite zombie story - Peter Stenson’s Fiend. They both do something within a genre that I love, even though sometimes it is stale.