As The World Dies: The First Days: A Zombie Trilogy

As The World Dies: The First Days: A Zombie Trilogy

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Editorial Reviews

Two very different women flee into the Texas Hill Country on the first day of the zombie rising. Together they struggle to rescue loved ones, find other survivors, and avoid the hungry undead.

Customer Reviews

This whole series rocks!

Reviewed by wolfen, 2010-02-14

I've been on a Zombie story reading binge the last couple weeks. This was the second author I read, and this whole series is great. I've read 3 other novels in this genre since this series, and they all pale in comparison.

Cool Zombie series

Reviewed by Peligrie, 2010-02-10

If you're reading this, you either sat through and read something like 80 reviews or you skipped to the last page (or sorted so that the date shows "newest"). So, you probably know what this book is about.

Now it comes down to whether or not you want to read it.

For me, it went like this....

I got a Kindle for Christmas. I decided to hunt around for books that I might be interested to read. Somehow, I ended up on a zombie book page through a hundred different link clicks.

I thought..."hmm...morbid title. What's this about?" ok, sure, I knew it was about zombies, but I meant what was the story about. I downloaded a sample of the book.

I felt like this was a very humanized version of how the zombie apocolypse could go down. It had a very human element to it, that was apparent in the characters.

Jenni is a wife and mother. Katie is a wife. Both lose most, if not all of their family in the zombie world. They stuggle, they fight, they mourn, and they live through it.

What amazed me about this book and the series is that it didn't just center around that event. It followed them as they moved forward from where the story begins.

Jenni loses some loved ones and in effect goes a little crazy at the loss. Katie loses her wife and struggles with the loss and later, in finding new love. This book deals in trying to live in a crazy, messed up world after all hell breaks loose, but zombies is very much apart of the story as you go along. Some people have mentioned "romance" and the like...but what gets me about this book is that, if all you're surrounded with is a bunch of dead things trying to kill you, and you manage to make it to safety, and months go by and your relatively "safe"....life goes on. You have sex, you fall in love, you become a hero, you become a jerkface. In the time after a massive zombie outbreak, the point is-- that life still goes on. And to me, Rhiannon found that nook in the genre and made things happen with it.


I was absolutely hooked. I wanted to know more about the lives of the people that were in the book. I wanted to know how they were all going to survive. I immediately downloaded the book and began to read. Infact I read all day, finished it, and downloaded the second one in the trilogy and luckily it was a Friday night, because I read it well into Saturday morning. Then I ordered the third one.

I found the story intriguing and I found the writing kept me interested in reading what was going to happen next. It didn't feel sluggish or boring to me at all.

These books actually got me reading even more of the genre -- so books I've bought about zombies (quite a few now) can actually thank Rhiannon Frater for putting me in the mood to read some more about zombies.

Lame Zombie Romance Novels

Reviewed by Steven E. Walker, 2010-02-10

I do not understand the glowing reviews for this book, or the other two in this series. I am an avid horror and zombie enthusiast (sounds funny), and if Max Brooks' World War Z is like a Guinness, then these Frater books are like a very lite beer. I don't discount Frater's books because they are "romantic," but I discount the romance because it includes cardboard characters, predictably paper thin sub-plots, and stories so "black & white," and "us vs. them" (and I'm not talking about the humans vs. the zombies), that I was skipping pages to get through them and avoid barfing (and NOT due to blood & guts). When I read a zombie novel, I want action, intensity, depth of zombie knowledge, and some semblance of details about how the weapons work, and don't work, and how the plague works and does not work. Again, in all these areas, these books fall far short. The only substantive knowledge Frater brings to the table is about the Texas geography. Her periodic mentions of "Romero zombies" are false tributes to her inspiration. Either get into the zombie lore, or don't mention Romero. The action becomes extremely repetitive, and the second and third books in the series are far worse because of the even further exaggeration of the either negative or positive attributes of the main and side characters. The good guys are angels, and the bad guys are devils. There are a few characters that are conflicted, but these inner conflicts are not explored with any depth. I was soon rooting against the good guys, hoping that they'd slip and fall and get eaten or that Frater would come to her senses and realize that a Harlequin romance novel set in a zombie apocalypse is anathema to the genre. And when good guys do meet their maker, they romantically come back as ghosts, so their characters never really die. Oh please! This book is the anti-The Road (McCarthy). It's like Josh Whedon's Buffy & Angel series on romantic steroids. These are not zombie or horror or action novels....these are romance novels set in zombie world with periodic action. Think day time soap opera meets Jerry Bruckheimer. If this is your cup of tea, to each his or her own, but I think these novels run counter to what most horror and zombie fans want from their horror fiction and film.

Very, Very, VERY good series, GET THEM ALL!

Reviewed by Richard J. Andrews Jr., 2010-01-22

This series is so dang good. This is the first book I purchased on the Kindle, and the first chapter got me hooked, that I knew I would love all three. Was I right. This book has it all, but most of all it make you connect with the character so much. I don't want to give anything away, but let's just say this is the first book I can remember crying too. I hear that she is making some spin-off books, and I just can't wait till they come out. Very enjoyable read.

Enjoyable Zombiefest

Reviewed by Toasted Cheese, 2010-01-19

I liked this book quite a bit. The pacing was quite good, and there were enough twists on the old standards to keep it interesting. It suffers, as has been said, from the standard editing (or lack there of) that comes along with many self-published or indie press books, but for the most part that was easy to ignore. Be aware, however, that if most zombie books tend to be "testosterone charged" this one is "estrogen fueled." The Protagonists are both women, one a lesbian and the other an abused housewife. This is not a drawback by any means, but it certainly takes up a large part of the story as these points are driven home again and again.