Warning: Spoilers for Feed, the first book in the Newsflesh series are below. Click away now if you haven’t read it.
The aftermath of the events of Feed have really done a number on Shaun Mason. Shooting your beloved sister as she turns into a zombie will do that to you. It’ll also have her setting up shop in your head for you to talk aloud to, lending credence to the popular theory that you’ve well and truly lost your marbles.
But what Shaun hasn’t lost is the need to avenge Georgia’s death, and while her killer has already taken himself out of the equation, a surprise visit from a supposedly dead CDC researcher soon makes it clear that he was just a very small cog in the conspiracy to use Kellis-Amberlee to keep the world cowering behind closed doors.
I didn’t mind the swap in narrators, even if I felt a little hammered over the head with Shaun’s dead sister hallucinations at times, and while we had to get to know a whole, almost new crew this time around, I was almost as attached to them come the end as I had been to the originals. That said, Deadline suffered a little from not being a self-contained thrill like Feed, needing instead to set up the wider conspiracy and ensuring that the reader understood the virological effects, meaning we needed quite a few explanations along the way. At times this really slowed down the pace of the story, which also ends without resolution (but with a couple of cliff-hangers to entice us into reading the third).
But these were minor quibbles and I’m still eager to read the rest of the series. I’ll just be taking a break first in case over-exposure breeds contempt.