Tom Leveen is a pristine example of why I'm reviewing an Arizona author every month at the Nameless Zine. I've met him a number of times, he's a nice guy and he gives good panel. My better half was even in one of his book promo videos, though not for this one. I've bought a few books from him over quite a few years that he's signed for me, and I haven't read any of them. So, it's clearly about time that I fixed that and this YA zombie novel is the one I pulled off the shelf. I read it over a couple of train journeys in the UK in April and, while I had to refresh myself on the details, the feel of it all stayed with me.

The tagline, almost inevitably, is 'The Breakfast Club' meets 'The Walking Dead' and, for once, that's an almost appropriate description. It doesn't take much to find flaws with the first half of that, but it's not entirely out of place. Our protagonists are a disparate group of ne'erdowell schoolkids who aren't bad enough that we don't have sympathy for them, even our narrator, Brian, who we quickly learn dumped Laura, his girlfriend of a year and a half as the medication she's on control her emotions because of her panic disorder suppress everything else too, including, so it's hinted, her libido. So Brian's a selfish asshole of a teenager because he's not getting much, but perhaps, a believable one. That decision does haunt him throughout this novel as the apocalypse arrives.

Brian and his friends Chad and Jack are supposed to be at school at this point, but they're not because they decided to skip a few classes to eat microwaved pizza at Chad's place. That means that they miss a few isolated incidents, like a fight in the gym that led to someone's finger being bitten off, but they're inevitably let in on the apocalypse. They see their friend Hollis, who'd called out seriously sick, because his seven-year-old kid brother Kyle bit him that morning. His mum's sicker still. The streets are emptied and the news reporters are trying to figure out what's going on at Phoenix Memorial Hospital. The CDC is apparently in town. And Brian's mum is an investigator at the county medical examiner's office who rings to let him know that she's been called out to a small town called Arroyo because weird things are happening.

Eventually, and it doesn't take too long to get through four or five skipped classes, they head back over to Phoenix Metro High School, driven by a few things. For one, they don't want to miss seventh period theatre because Mrs. Golab would be pissed and it's an easy blow-off class for them. For another, most of the school is going to the pep rally instead, crucially including Laura and her best friend Kenzie, who's also Brian's sister. Brian may be an asshole but he wants to protect Laura, not only because of the guilt wracking him after dumping her, and he wants to protect Kenzie too, whom he won't ever forget nearly died seven years ago. And the girls are messaging him that there's a huge fight at the pep rally.

Where we go from here is mostly as you'll expect but I don't think it's fair to say that you can write the rest yourself. Tom Leveen writes smooth prose that skims along effortlessly, almost like he could teach classes on writing YA—he can and does—but he's not above flouting our expectations when he feels an abiding need. No, I'm not going to spoil this, but I will say that not everyone you'll take for granted will survive actually does. It's testament to Leveen's skills as an author that, whenever a whoa! moment is sprung on us, we feel the emotions that we're supposed to, even if we're fifty-something grandparents and not teenage boys.

I will mention a few things that perhaps I shouldn't though. One is that Laura is one of the characters to survive. Is that a spoiler? Only kinda sorta, because it's so clear from her condition that she absolutely has to be a quick and easy victim that she isn't going to be and I think everyone reading this book surely has to make that same assumption. The school is effectively under lockdown, with steel fences around the campus that have spikes on the top. Zombies, or whatever they are, are inside the grounds and they are strong and fast and eager to indulge in the smörgåsbord of tasty morsels trying to hide from them. If Laura died, I don't think there's a single reader who would forgive the author for that.

Another is that, while the core clique we follow include some pretty fit and tough people, like Chad who is aching to sign up for the Marines and Cammy who leads the cheerleader squad, the heroes of the day are really the theatre department and, by that, I mean the students who work it. They spend their time building things and taking things down and providing whatever's needed for any particular need, so it's perhaps not too surprising that they may be best equipped to combat a zombie infestation, but it's not what we expect from a YA novel. Theatre isn't a cool class, right? Those dudes are nerds and all the cool kids are supposed to laugh at them and pick on them. I've seen American high school movies.

So kudos to Tom Leveen for creating believably damaged characters like Brian, Kenzie and Laura, none of whom feel like typical YA characters but none of whom feel unbelievable either. And kudos to him for making the stage nerds the heroes. In fact, let's throw some more kudos at him for making this quite a gorefest for a YA novel. There are definitely some edgy scenes here but they never really transcend the undefined (or maybe defined) boundaries between YA and adult fiction. No adult will read this and feel that it's a horror novel. It's always a YA horror novel and those two letters are pretty important.

There are things that I won't give him kudos for though. Some of the little subplots he sets into motion don't get resolved and it's not because there was ever going to be a sequel to handle all that. They just fall by the wayside, perhaps understandably for a zombie apocalypse but not for a crafted novel. There are some plot holes that I noticed, most of them to do with the capabilities that he gives these zombies and what we realise when we try to put the entire school in view rather than whoever we're focused on at any particular point in time. Realistically, Leveen believably sets up everyone in there to die, quickly and efficiently, but then has to conjure up ways for some of them to get out and, while we enjoy how he does that, we don't ever fully buy into them.

Now, those aren't big complaints and they don't nullify the success that this book is but, if I was Brian's theatre teacher and I was forced to rate this, they would knock off some marks. I'd still recommend this book to teenagers though, and even to older audiences who might not feel drawn to YA generally. And it makes me interested in reading some of his other YA books that I've bought over the years that looked, well, a little angsty. This has a higher rating at Goodreads than Manicpixiedreamgirl, but not as high as Random, Zero or Party. That bodes well. ~~ Hal C F Astell