Life After: The Phoenix (2014) by Bryan Way - Short Zombie Horror Story Review

Life After: The Phoenix is the third and final story in Bryan Way's short story trilogy that followed from his first novel in the Life After universe, Life After: The Arising. His second short story, Life After: The Basement went to some dark zombie free places, so I hoped this wouldn't go the same way. This one felt like the shortest of his stories, I managed to read the whole thing in under half an hour, it was perhaps also the best of the three.

Adam and Shar were in a relationship that came to an end several months previously. Now, Adam, who is still besotted with his ex, gets to see her for fleeting minutes during her break while she works nights at a supermarket. It is after one such meeting, one that resulted as usual in an argument, that Adam notices people behaving strangely in the carpark. He soon comes to realise that the strange riots that have occurred in a nearby town have spread, and so sets out to find his ex and protect her.

Way's male protagonists always appear to be quite flawed people and here is no different. With Adam you have someone who takes out his frustration by hitting things, not people, but things. This turns out badly here as he injures his hand even before he encounters the undead, making him in my eyes a bit of an idiot. Elsewhere however things hit a little closer to home, some of the dialogue that occurs between Adam and Shar were things I had heard before in real life, maybe slightly painful to read but it isn't often I resonate with dialogue in a book! As may be guessed, having an argument about a break-up while in the middle of an unfolding zombie apocalypse really isn't the best way you could be spending your time, leading to inevitable situations.

Seeming to not even be set in the same town as The Arising and the other two shorts, this felt the least connected. The connected threads however I did enjoy, we are provided with an alternate take on Anderson (my favourite character from the main novel), and even Grey is name dropped, the suggestion that he may be the best person to team up with during a zombie outbreak made me chuckle. I enjoyed Life After: The Phoenix, it has undead, it has action, and it has characters who at least in some small way felt real.

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