With Halloween just over, I would like to bring to your attention one of the best zombie novels that not many people have read before: Ashes by Ilsa J Bick.

Ashes is a different zombie novel in the sense that the reader isn’t thrown into a zombie apocalypse, but rather gets to experience it as it happens. The novel starts with the main character, Alex, on a hike in order to spread her parents’ ashes and settle her personal problems. While on this journey, an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) goes off that destroys all electronics. This EMP also ends up killing billions of people in the process. The EMP also has other side effects on people.

After the EMP, Alex continues the hike, not understanding what had just happened and ends up running into a man named Tom and a child named Ellie. Throughout the novel, these three go through their new life trying to figure out what had caused the zombies to come into existence while also trying to stay alive in this new world. While our three main characters must trust each other in order to survive, they run into people and groups that only want to use them.

One thing that makes this novel so amazing is the fact that all the characters are completely believable. None of them have skills that simply does not fit with their past. Tom is a young solider, so everything he does throughout the novel fits with his being a solider. Likewise, Alex was not a soldier, so she has no idea how to handle situations like Tom does.

At the same time, the way that the apocalypse happened is not all that unrealistic, either. Most other zombie apocalypses happen because of people trying to cure some sort of disease, and somehow, spreading to the entire world. In this case, an EMP could have the potential to have strange effects on people such as those presented in Ashes.

In addition, Bick does a phenomenal job at hooking the reader into her novel. The way every chapter ends makes the reader want more. This novel is extremely hard to put down once it gets going, which, luckily, does not take too long. Bick uses graphic details in order to describe a scene, and it helps the reader paint a clear picture of what a zombie looks like or what a person does.

Ashes is just the first book in this trilogy. Unlike most other novel series, each novel is just as intense as the last. Each novel ends with a cliffhanger that makes you have to buy the next one in order to see what happens to some of your favorite characters.