The zombie apocalypse genre is an age old genre that really hasn’t gotten a fresh  spin on it in any form of media in which an apocalypse story is told. The formula is tried and true: sickness strikes, protagonists are caught off guard and confused about their situation, weaker characters rise in some kind of “road trip”tale. As I said, this is tried and true, however, although it is sucessful,without a cast of compelling characters or creative takes on classic situations, a zombie apocalypse story can quickly rot away into the void. Luckily, for Doug Ward’s venture into the genre, “Parasite: The True Story of the Zombie Apocalypse,” does not suffer from relying on cliches to carry the tale of Henry and Melissa.

  Synopsis: The apocalypse, hits while entemologist, Henry, is at work. He travels home to find utter chaos in the world he has come to know when he realizes his wife Melissa is not at home. Henry must now travel through a city of the infected to find and rescue Melissa, who is also fighting for her life to survive and be reunited with her husband.  Along their journey they meet other survivors and discover something sinister about the origins of the disaster.

I don’t need to go into the zombie action in this book because, to be honest, it is very similar to what I had read previously in The Late Night Horror Show’s zombie section. This is no negative point directed at Ward because, in all honesty there is not much zombie action anywhere other than shamble, bite, hit them in the head. What Ward did differently in “Parasite” was add a layer of heart and description to the more key zombie attack scenes that could have borderlined cliche. This made the story special to me, as a reader, and the emotions drawn from the scenes gave me a sense of ownership in the story and really invested my attention in the journey. Nice job Mr. Ward!

As I mentioned before, the road trip story has been done to death in all genres, and this aspect of the story was my least favorite part, however, Ward was smart in his approach to the format by creating characters, not usually seen in the zombie apocalypse story. Readers get the scientist, computer whiz, and business personalities to mesh with the usual suspects, who are in the background of the interesting plot. Ward uses minimal dialogue and forces the reader to EXPERIENCE rather than read, putting us in the eye of the storm. By the end of the book, I had become so invested in the characters that my heart broke whenever one of them was offed. This emotion is rare in a genre where an audience roots for protagonists to die gory deaths. This emotion, made me love a story that in the beginning, I predicted as something I had seen done before. There is also a scientific aspect to the story that is VERY cool, but I won’t divulge the goods in order to remain spoiler free! But this plot point is a big seller for the story.

As far as the writing, it is faced paced and never lags. The reader is pushed along the story as hurried as the characters in the undead world Ward has created. There are some minor grammatical errors and extra words that could have been examined closer in editing, but overall, this is a minor issue, unlike other books out in the e-universe.

Overall, “Parasite” is a fast, enjoyable read, that offers a different take on a familiar story. It is definitely worth checking out if one is a fan of good zombie horror that puts the characters before the relevance of the zombies (i.e. The Walking Dead). You can find this book and its sequel on Amazon .com. I don’t know why you’re still reading this. GO BUY IT NOW!