What happens when the world ends, the cure is found, and you still have to figure out how to live?
✶ PRE-READING ✶
Zombie stories usually have one fairly fundamental problem: once you're a zombie, you're dead.
Love and Other Cures for the Recently Undead takes that idea in a completely different direction. Here, the zombie outbreak is caused by a virus, and the discovery of a cure means that some of the people infected can actually come back.
That immediately made me curious. What happens to the people who return? What happens when the world they knew has moved on without them?
✶ POST-READING ✶
As I thought... the idea is fantastic.
The Kill Virus essentially freezes the body's processes, which means that once the virus itself can be cured, doctors can rush to repair whatever physical damage the person sustained while infected. Some people can't be saved because their injuries are too severe, but many can return to life.
CeCe is one of them.
And I loved the practical details of that process. The first Reviveds are treated in a makeshift hospital in a Costco, which is exactly the sort of detail that makes a post-apocalyptic story feel real to me. Of course that's where you'd put a temporary hospital: enormous building, lots of supplies, parking for days.
CeCe's experience of coming back also feels emotionally convincing. Everything she has known has changed, and the teenage angst that might normally be manageable has been turned up to twelve because she has lost her mother, her brother is missing, she's missed two years of her life, and she has to learn how to exist in a body that doesn't quite feel like hers anymore.
I'd absolutely love to see this as a miniseries. I think the process of CeCe learning to walk, speak and live again could be incredibly powerful on screen.
It surprised me by... how much I wanted more from the world around CeCe.
The character work is strong, and the central idea is fascinating, but I occasionally found myself asking questions the story didn't quite answer.
For example, we're told that people who survived the two years outside military protection are unusual enough to have their own designation: Survivors. That made me wonder about the population as a whole. If surviving independently was so rare, how many people are now Revived?
Then there are smaller things that kept pulling me out. CeCe's father spent most of the outbreak on a military base working on the cure. Her mother died early, and her brother was missing, so there was nobody living in their house.
Yet when they return, the house hasn't been ransacked or attacked, despite another family on the same street being Survivors.
People are still driving cars and motorbikes after two years of societal collapse, which is a common feature of zombie fiction but one that always makes me wonder how the logistics are supposed to work.
None of these things are necessarily problems for every reader. Most people will quite reasonably accept the world as presented and carry on with the story.
But for me, they stood out because I liked the premise so much that I wanted to understand how the world worked.
That's ultimately my feeling about the book: I really enjoyed it, and I think the concept is excellent. I just wanted the worldbuilding to go one layer deeper.
✦ RECOMMENDATIONS ✦
Book Recommendation: The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey, for another take on infection, humanity and what happens when the boundaries between “infected” and “human” become much less straightforward.
TV or Movie Recommendation: The Last of Us, particularly for the way it uses an apocalyptic setting to explore grief, relationships and what people owe each other rather than making the infected the entire story.
✧ VIBE CHECK ✧
A colour palette: faded hospital white, asphalt grey, washed-out blue and the green of new growth pushing through abandoned places.
A soundtrack: quiet piano and distant electronic sounds, with sudden bursts of something louder when memories break through.
A season: early spring, when the world is beginning again but everything still looks damaged from winter.
A mood: disoriented, grieving, tender and cautiously hopeful.
A scent: disinfectant, dust, rain on concrete and the faint smell of something growing where it shouldn't.
A texture: hospital sheets against skin that doesn't quite feel like your own.
★ TAROT CARD PULLED ★
The Tower.
The Tower is often read as catastrophe, but its deeper meaning is about the sudden destruction of the structures we thought were permanent.
For CeCe, almost everything familiar disappears at once.
Her body changes. Her mother is gone. Her brother is missing. Two years of her life have vanished. The world she remembers has been dismantled while she was unable to experience the change herself.
And then, extraordinarily, she is given the chance to begin again.
The Tower doesn't promise that rebuilding will be easy.
It simply says that the old structure is gone, and something new has to be built in its place.
✦ THE TRUE QUESTION ✦
How do you build a life when everything you knew has changed?
CeCe doesn't simply have to recover from being infected.
She has to recover from being left behind by her own life.
The world has changed without her, the people she loved have changed or disappeared, and even her own body no longer feels entirely familiar.
The cure can bring her back.
It can't give her back the life she lost.
So she has to work out what comes next.
Final Thoughts
Love and Other Cures for the Recently Undead publishes on the 6th of October. I received a free copy and am giving an honest review.
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