As the World Ends: Siege by Rhiannon Frater

(read and written May 2012)


The third installment of this excellent zombie apocalypse trilogy finishes the story of a small group of survivors struggling to live in the aftermath, rather than simply exist. This theme, of course, is not necessarily unique or new; however, the way that Frater writes the characters into life (and death) is exceptional. I have read a LOT of zombie fiction-it's one of my favorite types of stories-and many have been good, some really good, and a select few have been excellent. The As the World Ends is one of the select few because it is not about the death of society, it is about the life of the characters within the pages. As a writer one of the most difficult tasks to accomplish is to have your character affect a reader in any meaningful way; this can be either positive or negative. If there is a character that you read about and hate so viscerally that you are rooting for their untimely demise, that author has done his or her job. Ditto for characters that you follow to their deaths, whom you weep for as they go, because even if they are only words on a page, they bleed just the same as you. Rhiannon Frater has done her job.