Review of the Book "Reanimated Americans"

From the review:

What if the dead rose – and didn't bother anyone? What if they didn't attack, kill, and eat the living? What if they just kind of…stumbled around?

If you think that sounds like the premise of the world's most boring zombie novel, then Martin Mundt has a truckload of surprises for you. In Reanimated Americans he's taken that very idea – a zombie apocalypse minus the apocalypse part – and turned in a savage (and savagely funny) commentary on the world we live in today.

In Mundt's novel, the world has largely learned to live with the living dead. The living have gone on with their lives, concentrating on families and careers and what's on the HD TV that night, leaving the problem of what to do with the dead as something else for the government to deal with. The government, never one to do anything that might upset a potential voter (even one that has died) has granted the corpses milling about American streets full rights. If they were American when they died, then by God they're still American, with all the rights and privileges thereof. Now, 19 years after the uprising, it's illegal to do much of anything to a zombie, including bury them, cremate them or shoot them in the head. Oh, and if you're a government employee, particularly of the new division of the Census Bureau charged with identifying and tagging the hundreds of thousands of dead bodies shambling through the streets, it's frowned upon to call them "zombies," or "deaders" or "Romeros" or "Free Range Soylent Green," or anything other than "Reanimated Americans." And yes, there's a memo that says so.