Empire is the first and probably the last zombie novel I'll ever read. Horror is just not up my alley. The book was loaned to me by a friend because it is a postapocalyptic zombie novel, and I have (long) been working on a piece of postapocalyptic fiction--albeit of a very different variety.
The book takes place in Jefferson Harbor, Louisiana, where there is a swamp containing a "Source" of dark energy that can bring the dead to life. The undead have caused a viral outbreak--anyone who is bitten becomes a zombie too, and the zombies feed on human flesh. The story takes place many decades after the initial outbreak and is accompanied by older journal entries describing life during the early stages of the plague, although most of the characters have lived their entire lives in the dark times following the outbreak.
Characters are picked off one by one throughout the course of Empire. You meet one and the next minute a zombie tears its head off, shoves its hand into the stump of the newly dead's neck, yanks out some brain tissue out and chews on it, blood and saliva gushing down its decaying face. Perhaps this is par for the course for the zombie genre; I don't really know. Reviewer Eve Blaack describes the book as "a futuresque zombie saga with enough 'guts' to quench the flesh-eating psycho within you." So I guess if that's your cup of tea, Empire probably fits the bill. If however, like me, you haven't yet had the desire to get in touch with that "flesh-eating psycho within you," then Empire may not be the book for you.
As far as the storyline, Death is a major character in Empire, one with whom the reader is sympathetic. Death's aim is to terminate the undead; in short, he is one of the good guys. The major antagonist, aside from the hordes of feral zombies, is a psychotic man in a big house in the swamp who has trained a small legion of undead that he created with his own hands by killing and bringing his adopted brothers and sisters back to "life" in the Source. These he pits against the remaining survivors in Jefferson Harbor, who eventually team up with Death for the book's gory dénouement.
I'm sure many zombie or horror aficionados will enjoy this book. I suppose I might have liked it better too, despite my general aversion to horror, were it not for the coinciding sub-themes of dark sexual desires--the character who tries quite graphically to rape his cousin, for example, or the antagonist who desires his 13-year-old adopted sister and gets a raging erection while plunging his hand into a dead human's guts. The sex-related themes seem to resolve themselves for the most part about midway through the book, becoming far less offensive at that point. Because of that, I was able to get into the rest of the story and actually become interested in the outcome instead of gritting my teeth and forcing myself to read it.
So there you have it. Although I imagine what I've ended up doing here is more of an explanation of my distaste for what I imagine the rest of zombie, or horror literature to be like rather than a clear review of the particular book Empire in and of itself, it is my hope that the reader will find at least something of use in these words.
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