The Undying
THEY HAVE COME FROM THE STARS… In this riveting apocalyptic thriller for fans of The Passage and The Walking Dead, a mysterious event plunges Paris into darkness and a young American must lead her friends to safety—and escape the ravenous “undying” who now roam the crumbling city. Jeanie and Ben arrive in Paris just in time for a festive New Year’s Eve celebration with local friends. They eat and drink and carry on until suddenly, at midnight, all the lights go out. Everywhere they look, buildings and streets are dark, as though the legendary Parisian revelry has somehow short circuited the entire city. By the next morning, all hell has broken loose. Fireballs rain down from the sky, the temperatures are rising, and people run screaming through the streets. Whatever has happened in Paris—rumors are of a comet striking the earth—Jeanie and Ben have no way of knowing how far it has spread, or how much worse it will get. As they attempt to flee the burning Latin Quarter—a harrowing journey that takes them across the city, descending deep into the catacombs, and eventually to a makeshift barracks at the Louvre Museum—Jeanie knows the worst is yet to come. So far, only she has witnessed pale, vampiric survivors who seem to exert a powerful hold on her whenever she catches them in her sights. These cunning, ravenous beings will come to be known as les moribund—the undying—and their numbers increase by the hour. When fate places a newborn boy in her care, Jeanie will stop at nothing to keep the infant safe and get out of Paris—even if it means facing off against the moribund and leaving Ben—and any hope of rescue—behind. **The publisher has provided this ebook to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices.**
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Points definitely go to The Undying for originality. From the moment I saw the line “They Came From The Stars”, I was sold. Anything that is a zombie apocalypse novel, but also decidedly not, stirs this little part of me that thrives off of the unknown. As apocalyptic happenings go, it's a fairly terrifying prospect. Being hunted down by the very people who were once running for their lives, just like you were. Yup, it gets me. I hoped Ethan Reid would take me on one hell of an adventure.
I wavered on my rating of this for a bit. See, I think the biggest flaw in this story is that the prologue starts the book off at the end. Rather than being thrown straight into the madness that is Paris in flames, we know Jeanie is alive because she's sharing with us her flashbacks of what happened. That, right away, threw me off a bit. Knowing that your main character will absolutely live and that she managed to do the one thing you didn't think she could? Well, it takes away from the rest of the story.
Which is a shame, because honestly The Undying is very well written. I absolutely loved the fact that Ethan Reid didn't try to push this story to a global scale. That he, rather expertly in my opinion, kept the action right in the heart of things. When something big happens, people speculate like mad about what is going on in other parts of the world. That's what Jeanie and her group did. They speculated. I was never sure what was truth, who was sane, or what would happen next. That, I liked. I was also rather impressed at how well paced the story was. I never loved the characters, persay, but I did feel connected to them in a way. I knew bad things were coming, but I couldn't look away.
Jeanie's obsession with protecting the baby kind drove me crazy, to no end. It's just my opinion, and I completely understand that it was being used to “keep hope alive”. I felt like it kept Jeanie's character from growing at all though. She never let go of her guilt, and that's one of the reasons she and I never meshed. The thing that clinched my three-star rating of this though, was that Reid shows the truth of human nature. I won't spoil, but trust me when I say that you'll feel frustrated and yet be nodding along. I kept reminding myself that I have no idea how I'd fare in an apocalypse. Happily there's a sequel to this! I'm thinking it's going to be even better.