Dying to Live

Dying to Live is Kim Paffenroth's first novel and quite an outstanding first attempt. The story follows Jonah Caine who is the all-in-one underdog, hero, and saint. Wandering, alone, across the apocalyptic terrain Jonah eventually joins up with a group that has holed up in a museum. The group is lead by Milton, who the rest of the group looks up to as some sort of messiah. Jack, on the other hand is tactical and logistical leader of the group. From their first meeting, Jonah and the museum folks fight the undead and other evil in the world just to have a merger existence.

Dying to Live is by no means a simple zombie bash. No, it also takes a page from Paffenroth's Gospel of The Dead and is very much an examination of humanity. Many show more comparisons are made between the living and undead. This quote (taken from memory, so I hope it is correct) "We are not evil, just dumb and clumsy" highlights this aspect of the book. The living, just like the unliving, are prone to be dumb and clumsy. Often Jonah struggles with killing the zombies, as he still identifies with them. He also observes that in many ways that the living are much more cruel than the dead.

Also, those who read the biblical story of Jonah & the novel Moby-Dick will see some familiar ideas. For instance the beginning of the book will surely remind you of Moby-Dick, while later; the story of Jonah is invoked.

While Dying to Live is the most intellectually stimulating zombie novel I have ever read, fear not, there is plenty of action, gore, and fright to go around. There are some very well described combat sequences, some downright frightening parts, and one particular scene during Frank's story that will both make you sick to your stomach and scare the crap out of you.

Dying to Live is an absolute great piece of writing that will both stimulate your mind and deliver the action and gore that we all love so much. With this book Kim Paffenroth shows that there is more to zombie fiction than eating flesh and killing with head shots. Dying to Live is a welcome break from the typical zombie book and the new favorite on the top of my list. show less

Like the real world the fictional world in Dying to Live is brutally unfair. One would expect no less from a book set a year after the world succumbed to zombies. This isn't a story of the uprising, the slow rot of the human beast. This is a tale part in retrospect, told by characters who are in a brave new world, but still remember and mourn their old world.

Jonah is a man living a grim existence, spared from the initial zombie take over, but finally persuaded to leave his seaborne safe haven to search out his loved ones. After finding his former home empty, with no signs of violence his life took a turn toward simple goals-- namely surviving. He wandered the countryside, with no purpose or goal outside of the drive to find food and not show more become food, until, by a million little coincidences, he finds a compound of survivors.

Hidden in what was once a museum the motley crew of living humans each have their own tales of how they came to safety, their own haunting losses and their own emotional battles to face just to maintain the will to survive in a dangerous world. Jonah and the war refugees wrestle not just with the undead, but with questions of how to, and even if they should, restart society in the face of the horrific future before them.

Flavored with a combination of Biblical end times and a touch of Richard Matheson's classic I Am Legend, Dying to Live is a novel that transcends the shuffling dead image of classic zombie fiction from the beginning, nearly taming the creatures by giving them an odd sort of humanity and exposing humans as the root of the evil. show less

Engrossing read with empathetic characters and a style that is surprisingly literate (Surprisingly? Let's face it, zombie books aren't meant to be the pinnacle of literature). Certain scenes are very memorable and, not to raise spoilers but referred to obliquely, they are: the initiation; the rooftop; the smoke trail. You’ll know to what I am referring once you’ve read it. If I have any criticism, and, oh, it is so very minor, is that the religious symbolism in the midst of the smoke trail scene is a little too…um, apparent; I think if it had been shrouded just a little more it would have been better.

I really enjoyed this book. Its not just a 'run around scared and shoot zombies" book. It was a real social commentary about how our lives intermingle, the good and the bad in everyone, and the way people react when grouped together. This is a book that really breaks the mold of typical horror fiction and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants a bit more that nightmare and adrenaline.

Rather than flowing as a continuous narrative, the book stalls through episodic encounters and cliched character introductions. This can be forgiven, due to the pulp nature of the zombie genre. What can't be forgiven is the arbitrary final act that has characters so two dimensionally evil, they defy suspension of disbelief, while failing even to give the characters a worthy nemesis.

The first part of the book is kind of annoyingly over descriptive and I don't really like the first person POV of this book, but the story was good and the characters are pretty likeable. It is a bit overly pessimistic, though. Slight SPOILER: there is a conflict with a large group of prisoners, and I have a hard time believing, that if it were real life and you found such a large group of them as in this book, that they would be as evil and depraved as in this situation. But hey, it's just a story. In spite of the negatives, I think I will continue reading the series.

Great & refreshing work ... They call it the thinking man's zombie novel ... I must say I enjoyed the cerebral aspects of the story - along with the standard fast-paced horror fare ... Definitely would recommend this book.