“Apocalypse Z” by Manel Loureiro – The Very Beginning of the End

Although zombie literature has plagued our bookshelves for quite some time now with book after book detailing the gruesome journey some heroes must undertake after the fall of man and the rise of flesh-eating corpses, Apocalypse Z by Manel Loureiro, and translated by Pamela Carmell, takes a somewhat different approach to the genre. More specifically, this time around, we get to see how humanity actually deals with the outbreak, what humanity’s final moments look like.

Just to give you a hint of how Manel thought things would go, the only warning of the incident comes from a deeply-buried and barely-noticed story in the Russian news. Somewhere, somehow, a virus is released, and those coming into contact with it end up turning into zombies.

Meanwhile, we are presented with a lawyer who has taken up writing as a way of dealing with his wife’s recent departure to the beyond. This lawyer ends up being the one to chronicle humanity’s final days, and needless to say, his accounts and opinions play a big part in the story.

Naturally, we are also shown how governments (those that haven’t had their parliament zombified I guess) react to the whole mess, how they attempt to raise safe havens to quarantine the uninfected from the flesh eaters, and how everyone just goes batshit crazy. Now, of course, we do need to have a hero, and so we are introduced to a lone survivor with makeshift weapons, who just happens to be humanity’s last chance against the outbreak.

Now I know I said Manel took a different direction with this book, and you may think I was lying when I introduced that mysterious loner to you in the end. Me too, I had a bad gut reaction to imagining reading through yet again another story where one person redeems humanity.

However, I still gave it a chance, and let me tell you, I was more than pleased. Yes, there are the clichéd moments where the unassuming protagonist shows of his badassery, but those who focus on them miss out on everything else the book has to offer, and there’s a lot of that.

As I said before, humanity’s final days are actually explored as we get to see how all kinds of different people react to this kind of apocalypse. Whereas in most books and movies we get to see the before, a bit of the transition, and a lot of the after, in Apocalypse Z we actually get a whole lot more of the transition period than anything else. If you found yourself reading zombie literature or watching zombie movies and asking yourself “but how did this all actually come to be?”, then this is probably the kind of book you've been looking for.

All in all, from a story perspective, Manel manages to deliver a brutal, primal, and most importantly, realistic gorefest. Naturally, I’m not sure as how a zombie apocalypse would be like, but if I had to bet on what it would look like, I’d bet on this book. It shows that the author was concerned with putting as much authenticity in it as possible, probably because it does such a good job at making you feel uneasy at the pain the characters are suffering. 

Speaking of the devil, while some of the characters feel a bit underdeveloped, the ones that have been given attention to are truly deep and complex to the point where you can actually feel and think like they do. In conclusion, it may be one of the best, if not the best zombie book out there, and any fan of the genre ought to give it a chance.

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Manel Loureiro Manel Loureiro is a Spanish author born in Pontevedra who studied law at the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, after which he worked in television on and off-screen. His eventual first book, Apocalypse Z, actually started out as a blog before it gained greatly in popularity. So far the Apocalypse Z series has three novels in it, with the second and third ones being respectively Los Dias Oscuros and La ira de los justos.