ZAC reviews the much anticipated sequel to the zombie cult hit Day by Day Armageddon.

Day by Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile picks up right where it’s previous book left off. That is to say that if the two were to be put together than you could very well have a single book. To recap the first book Day by Day Armageddon was about a Navy Pilot who is trying his very damnest to survive the zombie apocalypse. It has everything a book that is about the zombie apocalypse should have, hordes of zombies, a main character who while has been trained by the military, and thusly gives himself credentials to being able to both handle a weapon as well as survive combat. He is also not a superman, black ops commando, who can stir a campfire with his dick while simultaneously beating two zombies together and crushing a third under his foot. He is in a very real sense, the everyman. A well educated, highly trained, and driven everyman, but an everyman nonetheless. During his trials he meets up with a few other survivors and they trek across country trying to find a place where they could survive and hold out until help arrives.

Day by Day Armageddon was a pretty good book, not great, but within the confines that the author wrote the book you would be hard pressed to ask for more. Day by Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile, however, does not live up to the standard that the first book set. Perhaps I am remembering the first Day by Day Armageddon too fondly through clouded memories of it being one of the few zombie books I was able to get my hands from my local book store, but simply put Day by Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile is not as good. The characters seem, I do not want to use the word shallow but there are no others that come to mind. The main character’s love interest is hardly characterized, which is easy to understand when the main character is expressing hardly any emotion at all. The lack of emotion hurts the story’s immersion and the at times clinically detached writing made me fell at times as if I was reading a bad book report about what Timmy did on his summer vacation and not a zombie horror book. Horror being something that is best experienced either very alone and scared or in a small group with the enemy nipping on your heels. The author seems to realize this because after a very mediocre first third the main character is dropped alone into the middle Hell’s rectum and force to survive with little more than his wits and luck.

During my read I can say that there was a single page after the main character is brought back to his roots and is fighting for his very life that I began to get attached to him. It quickly passed and I went back to reading in about how he survived this and that. The book, also, ends too quickly. The entire book is only a little more than 275 pages. Hardly long. A few hours read if it was good, but it took me a solid two weeks to slog through it because it simply did not grab me right away.

Now, for those who have made it this far, and through all of my complaints, let me make clear that Day by Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile is not bad. It is not great, but it is not bad. I would say that it is solidly mediocre. It is far from a life changing and genre altering book, but is far from the horrible and poorly written stories that often times one comes across when looking for zombie stories. Compared to the screenplays of a most zombie movies it is fabulous, but compared to Feed by Mira Grant, it is falls far behind. Simply put, I expected the author to take and improve upon his first book and I feel that he did not do so.

In the end, if you absolutely loved Day by Day Armageddon then Beyond Exile is a book that you will too love. However, if you though Day by Day Armageddon was only okay then Beyond Exile will not likely be a book that you will swoon over.

On the ZAC book rating scale I get Beyond Exile One of Two Stumps up.