REVIEW: After Life by: Jaron Knuth

There are a lot of things to discuss about this book. Things that are both good and bad. This book was more of a romance novel than it was a zombie novel. At certain points throughout the book I forgot that I was actually reading a zombie novel. It was like the zombies weren’t a big factor of the story. I knew that the author’s intention in this book was to focus on the relationship between Alex and Morgan, but he still could have incorporated more interaction between characters and zombies within the plot of the story.

Plot: This story started off very strong. The first few pages about Alex were presented well and he laid a solid foundation for the rest of the story. I have said this before in other reviews and I will say it again: It is important to show a scene of what the character’s life was like before the chaos. (or whatever conflict) By showing how the character’s ordinary life was like, you establish a very strong ground floor for the character’s personality, and how the chaos affects said personality. This was a very strong move made by the author, and it hasn’t been done by very many authors because the majority of authors want to draw their reader in right away. The plot after that, is where I have problems. The plot was a little predictable, almost cliché.

This hurt my view of the story very much because I was expecting something fresh, and I was waiting for it, but I felt a little disappointed. He didn’t really surprise me, and I felt that he didn’t bring anything new to the genre. I felt he should have made the zombies a much more prominent element to the story, thus adding horror to it. Plot wise, this book was a little lacklustre and it needed tweaking, it had potential, but came up short in my opinion.

Characters: Uh-Oh. This is where a few problems occur. In the first section of the book, the author did a stellar job of making the two main characters personable. He made them realistic and I liked how he explained their background. However, throughout the book, his weak dialogue uses diluted his characters. I have seen this a few times before, when the author does an amazing job describing the character’s personalities, but those personalities don’t reflect so well in his dialogue. Also, the other characters in this story were a little translucent, and they just didn’t seem real. They just didn’t have any depth to them, and I felt little to nothing for any of the secondary characters. The relationship between Alex and Morgan was composed well and it evolved at a solid pace throughout the story.

The romance portion of this book, (which was the most of the book) was done fairly well. This book was definitely romance oriented than it was horror bound. But again, the romance aspect of the story could have been presented stronger, if he had developed a stronger dialogue with each character’s personality woven into it. ( its difficult, but you can develop good characters through augmenting their accent, diction and even mannerism of speech)

Writing: His descriptive writing is good and composed well. There occurs another issue involving his descriptive writing abilities: he can describe environment and character’s with a nice creative touch, but he lacks a certain confidence with any of his action sequences. This book is clearly not action driven, but the action scenes were lacking certain characteristics that could have made it appealing and interesting.

Philosophical aspects: The best aspect of this novel was the philosophical statements. This book has some deep thoughts intertwined with his splendid descriptive scenes. I enjoyed pondering some of the thoughts situated within his story, this added a nice element to the story. The author did an excellent job foreshadowing thoughts that would later intertwine with thoughts about life, death and love. The title was also very clever.

Overall: Okay, Overall. This book is a short read. (despite its slow pace) If you are looking for a zombie novel, I don’t know if I would recommend this because the zombies didn’t feel like a concerning element in the story. I would consider this a good apocalyptic romance story. Now, if the author can make the necessary changes, he has some potential, but he has to bring something fresh. This book did make me think, it’s a good book for the deep thinking kind of reader.

Available on Amazon