A zombie infection has spread over the globe. In a handful of months, the survivor Dr. Robert Twombly keeps a record of the horrible disease in what had once been his birding journal. Rather than sketching and taking note of Black-Billed Magpies, he captures the horror of the dark events occurring around him and the progression of the undead population.

I consider myself a zombie enthusiast. After all, I was raised to think that George Romero is a genius (and the belief has never faded). As a result, I was eagerly anticipating this book. Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection sounded amazing: a record--told by a doctor--day by painful day of survival.

When I received the book, I first flipped through to assess the illustrations. Chris Lane did a fantastic job. The images are gory, disturbing, and look like they were done in appropriate water colors for a birding journal (though I'm amazed the Dr. Twombly was able to keep sketching supplies!).

The disappointment didn't begin until I started reading. The flaw isn't the format. The journal format can be incredibly suspenseful, if done well (see Day by Day Armageddon by J.L. Bourne), but in the case of Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection it feels as if the authors weren't entirely sure what to do with it. This leaves the entire book feeling meandering and dull. The suspense never really picks up and characters never seem to develop. The authors attempt a few details to make the text seem more authentic that only served to annoy me. Within the book there will be scratched out phrases, in which Dr. Twombly wanted to say one thing and instead says another. This is fine with me as an idea, but if a intelligent guy is going to scratch things out and fix them, he could at least do it with grammar that's readable. I don't know if it's just poor editing or "authentic", but either way I had to stop multiple times in the book to figure out what the text was trying to tell me. Here's one example of these barely readable sentences (exactly as it appears):
"When I killed [scribbled section] killed? Paul or whatever it was the acid had removed either a crucial part of the brain or enough of the brain to stop it."

I was really hoping that the 'doctor' aspect would be utilized. I wanted to see, perhaps, a doctor terrified into intellectualizing the entire fall of mankind into illness. Instead, Roff and Lane offer the half-hearted Twombly who does note a few uninteresting details in the physicality of zombies, but never appears to care one way or the other.

The story is a bunch of assembled bits and pieces found elsewhere. I firmly believe that every aspect of this book has been done better elsewhere, which makes this book feel a little like a poor-quality offering of little imagination.

By far, the best part of this book is the illustrations, otherwise I would say that a reader isn't missing much by skipping out on this one. Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection is a fantastic idea and beautifully illustrated, but executed poorly. Rather than allowing the journal format to aid the story-telling, the authors seem at a loss with how to build suspense and characterization--which reduces the book to a series of unfortunate, familiar, dull zombie events and nothing more. ( )