Vitus Adamson isn’t just a three-time loser, an ex-soldier, an ex-husband and an ex-father who investigates the small-change domestic trivia which the police barely even consider crime. The rank miasma which hangs around him isn’t the usual mix of booze and fags and failure. His shuffling gait and unsteady handshake aren’t down to depression or PTSD. He’s a flesh-eating zombie – one who is firmly medicated in order to carry on the semblance of a normal life, right alongside everyday society.

This is a nifty set-up, which initially blends pulp fiction with semi-credible science. It’s snappy; self-aware, full of sassy one-liners and smart asides with a tip of the hat to the usual zombie apocalypse tropes. Then as he starts to search for a missing teenager, the narrative takes a step sideways, leaving behind the referential post-ironic comments and cranking up the suggestions of Unspeakable Awfulness in dark places.

You’re never sure if this is going to gestate into a full-on horror epic, or transform into a spiky expose of the human menace of the military-industrial complex… or just settle for being a story of personal redemption. It veers between pulp hack-n-slash horror and earnest debates on the nature of identity and the disintegration of the self; a mix of B-movie monsters and dime-store psychology. Ambitious, and tricky to pull off.

I hugely enjoyed the notion of the zombie PI and his unique situation. I wasn’t sure that the more extreme elements of the storyline sat comfortably alongside the real-world backdrop. The narrative and tongue-in-cheek dialogue, subtle and savage in the opening chapters, kinda slithered into platitudes in the latter part. Similarly, a steamily raunchy scene involving a plastic sheet and consenting partners, which made zombie sex seem a real possibility, was later replaced by doe-eyed sentimentality.

So ‘Bring Me Flesh’ grabbed me at the get-go but my attention flagged somewhat by the end. I’d probably have enjoyed a less involved investigation, one without so much personal baggage. That said, it’s is easily the most accomplished zombie noir I’ve ever read…
7/10

There's more details about plot and character over at
https://murdermayhemandmore.wordpress.com/2015/12/08/bring-me-flesh-an-undead-de... ( )