When the old crypt was cracked open the numerous flies which escaped carried a virulent viral contagion which killed and then reanimated its victims. As the plague spreads, its multiple victims and survivors chronicle the fall of mankind...

Zombie Apocalypse: Endgame (2014. 542 pages) is an anthology series created by Stephen Jones, an English writer and editor, who normally works in the horror genre. The book is the third in the series.

Each of the books is created as a collection of letters, medical reports and reminiscences, across many forms of media, which chronicle the spread of the human reanimation virus, essentially creating an ever growing army of the undead. Some of whom are your usual brain eating shamblers, while a smaller group retain their memories and personalities.

The book's back cover promises to finally reveal the true extent of Thomas Moreby’s plan for world domination and ends up doing quite the reverse. It’s a brave experiment to have the book constructed from numerous individual authors and in some cases the found document format, such as World War Z shows how this multiple perspective can work well, but in the case of WWZ, the overall narrative was controlled by Max Brooks. In the case of Apocalypse this vein of connecting narrative was often missing and I got to the end, not only no wiser as to the plan, but more confused as to what was going on.

There is also the questionable book cover which gives the impression that you’re going to read a book about rampaging Nazi zombies battling the surviving humans with zeppelins and prehistoric creatures, nothing could be further from the truth. The tone of the book is very downbeat as you read the last remaining words of the victims.

With twenty plus contributors, most of the individual sections are fairly short which makes it difficult to empathise with the characters, which will inevitably die. The book works best if you think of it as a loose anthology which picks out aspects of the plague, without sticking to a strong central story.

Overall, it’s a great concept and some of the contributions are particularly strong, but a central story, to hold the whole thing together, is sorely missing.

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Charles Packer