When a scientist finally succeeds in reanimating a corpse, he unleashes a plague which sweeps the world. As the reanimated dead attack the living, civilisation quickly collapses and everyone tries to find a safe place to survive. For Scarlet, Nathan and Miranda this is the isolated Ranch of Red Hill, equipped with both food and guns, it is a hope for salvation. The only problem is, they have to get there first...

Red Hill is a zombie/romance novel by Jamie McGuire.

McGuire’s focus is on the relationships within her story, so there is less graphic descriptions of bodies being torn apart than you will find in other zombie novels. The only downside to this is that there is almost no run up to the outbreak and no logical progression, the catastrophe happens much quicker than it should, even if it had not been spread by contact, but airborne.

Unlike World War Z which used a zombie outbreak to show the inadequacies of bureaucracies, so required a slow spread, McGuire just needs the plague to happen so she can concentrate on her characters reactions. In the end the zombies become almost an irrelevance, the plot would have needed little in the way of changing if she had decided to set it against, a catastrophic natural disaster.

That concentration on the emotional and eventually romantic aspects of the novel means that some of the book's internal logic is odd. As we focus down on her main characters, the world noticeably shrinks, so the government appear to sit on its hands for an exceedingly long time, before it turns up at the last minute a little too gung-ho.

The author said that she was inspired by The Walking Dead and I suspect from the novel that this was the very talky season two, rather than the better seasons one and three. You can see the connection with the show as the concentration is on the internal conflicts of the characters, often with the threat disappearing into the background.

That is not to say that the book is not well written and the author succeeds in weaving the stories of Scarlet, Nathan and Miranda together in an interesting way, even if I found it difficult to like them as people. The first half of the book is better than the second, although this all depends on what you are looking for.

Once they reach Red Hill, and the focus switches to relationships, you may well applaud this is if you’re a fan of romances, unfortunately I am not. Rather than feeling like the best of The Walking Dead, the book felt more akin to Terry Nation’s Survivors, with Abbie continually going on about her son and the romantic entanglements of the main characters.

So the book is never going to be a zombie classic, but it is well written and should appeal to McGuire’s fans.

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Charles Packer