Temple Library Reviews is reviewing every story in the anthology The Living Dead, which contains my piece “The Skull-Faced Boy.” My story’s in the latter half of the book, and the reviews have been going up since December, so for a long time this review has been approaching … slowly … slowly but inexorably … like a hungry zombie. I was thinking what a drag it would be if after all that suspense they totally slagged the story, but fortunately the review is quite positive:
“The Skull-Faced Boy” by David Barr Kirtley: Another interesting story, which is emotional as well as a pure joy to read due to the world-building decisions. According to Kirtley, those newly deceased of natural causes and incidents come back as zombies who are intelligent but also with no hunger. This however is not the case with those dead for a longer period of time or already munched on. The main protagonists are Jack and Dustin, who die in a car crash on the night zombies decide to rise, and while Jack has an intact humanity and moral compass, Dustin raises an army of the dead and decides to conquer the living in America. Fun, huh? But not for Jack, who has to be an outsider and treated with hate by the living and feel out of place with the other intelligent dead. I can really connect with this story since it is largely about those people, the minorities, the misfits, who are usually looked down on and mistreated for being different.
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