The Rising by Brian Keene

". . . Brian Keene takes horror to a new level"

"Each character is well drawn and complex in a story that never wanders."

In West Virginia Jim Thurmond, safe in a bomb shelter, listens to a voice mail message from his son Danny in New Jersey just before the battery on his cell phone dies. "…I love you more than ''finity." Danny is alive, trapped in the attic with his mother. Above him, Jim''s dead wife Carrie and the zombies who were once his neighbors howl in the night and Jim must get past them to save Danny.

Jim arms himself and faces the zombies who bar his way, beginning a journey that once took a single day before the dead rose. Along the way, Jim allies with a minister, a hooker, and the scientist whose super collider experiments opened a rift into the void, setting an ancient evil free.

Battling rogue National Guard forces in Pennsylvania, backwoods cannibals, and the living dead on the ground and in the sky, Jim races to save his son.

The Rising''s mix of gore and living dead at first seems like another cliche of the living dead, but Brian Keene takes horror to a new level. These zombies do not shamble and stumble blindly toward the living. They

move with intelligence, capable of accessing the memories contained in the bodies they possess, as they combine their scattered forces into an army of the dead bent on the destruction of mankind. Each character is well drawn and complex in a story that never wanders. Keene combines solid science and imagination, painting a monstrous landscape of Armageddon. In spite of

its fast pace, The Rising is a slow read at night where every thump and howling wind is a zombie slavering for another victim.

Reviewer: J. M. Cornwell