The fifth and final story in the Zooey Zombie series is out today! Don’t miss this exciting conclusion to the popular novella saga. It’s available through Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, Paperback, and Audiobook (tomorrow).
In this thrilling conclusion to the Zooey Zombie series, Zooey’s world falls apart. Her once-friend Ren forces her to take a serum that transforms her back into a zombie. But she’s not any ordinary zombie. She’s a super zombie who can think, talk, react, and is the perfect killing machine. Zooey fights her zombie urges as she’s taken back to the Undead Ward for study and arrest. While there, she discovers she’s not the only one Ren turned. Can she find a way out of the Undead Ward to stop Ren before he destroys the world with his new serum?
Writing this series has been so fun for me. I love that they are quick to read with short chapter I can just sit down for a few minutes and enjoy, but at the same time they are so packed with mystery and adventure! This whole world started with my Dead Soil series, which follows several groups of people, including Christine Moore who is a character in Zooey Zombie as well, through the hellish year of the zombie apocalypse in Chicago. It was interesting for me to travel out of my hometown area of Chicago, and place myself and Zooey in one of my favorite cities in America, Boston. It has such history and beauty to it! It was exciting to bring that to life in this series. I loved the falltime vibes the books brought, cozy mystery meets supernatural thriller!
A lot happens in this series for its timeframe to only span a few months. Zooey is found wandering the Boston Common as a zombie at the end of the apocalypse. She isn’t too far gone, and so she can be revived with the new Z-shot, a serum that turns zombies back into living beings. But these beings are a little different than regular humans, and so a new race is created. The Undead. Get it? Because they were dead and now they’re not? Anyway, Zooey spends the first book in rehab where she learns to interact with the human world again. She meets lots of Undead friends, including Ren, a mysterious British Undead with lots of big ideas about how the government is handling this new race of beings. In book two, Zooey is released back into the world and she tries to put her life back together. Her first stop is the re-enroll in her Psychology graduate program at Harvard, but she quickly learns her kind is not wanted there, nor at her former job. In fact, it seems the humans don’t trust the Undead at all. As more discord grows between the two races, the Undead are segregated more and more. They are required to wear giant U patches on all clothing at all times so everyone knows they are not human, and they even have strict curfews. Zooey adheres to the rules and goes to every Z-shot and therapy appointment she has, though she quickly realizes the shots have less effect each time she goes, and the hunger for brains is quietly playing in the background of her mind at all times.
The military develops its own branch called the Z-Division of the National Guard, and these soldiers patrol the area, keeping the streets zombie-free and the Undead under control. While strolling through the Boston Common, where Zooey was found as a zombie, she meets a Z-Division soldier who is different than the others. A bond is formed between Miles and Zooey that eventually becomes unbreakable, though she tries many times to break it in order to keep him safe. Together, Zooey and her friends fight injustice as the laws against the Undead get more and more unfair. Zooey is thrown into the Undead gated town of Mattapan without warning and has to figure out a new way of life without her human companions. The only reprise she gets is when she is approved to work at a zombie escape room in the heart of Boston. But when a group of college kids take their hatred of the Undead too far, Zooey is caught up in a mystery only she and her friends can solve, and her former friend Ren is at the heart of it as he develops his own serum to unleash the inner zombie within the Undead.
In the final conclusion, Ren has forced Zooey to take his new serum, turning her back into a monster. But she’s not a mindless, hungry zombie this time. She can think, feel, plan, and she’s a deadly killing machine. She fights her overwhelming urge for brains in order to stop Ren before he destroys her beloved city, and possibly the world, with his new serum.
The series might be over, but the world continues on. Check out the last page in the book to see the next monster we’ll be following in this supernatural alternative world!
Alex Apostol 