Life After: The Arising was a zombie novel from 2013 that made the mundane the focal point of the story, and by doing so really seemed to set itself apart. That novel was followed by three novellas taking place in and around the events of that one. In 2016 the full length sequel, Life After: The Void was released, and that too has a trilogy of stand alone novellas to accompany it. The first of these was Life After: The Maze.
A lot of the events of this particular story only start to make sense once the story is over, with the characters seemingly more clued into their current plight than the reader is. Four survivors of the zombie apocalypse have battled their way into a strangely designed building in the middle of a dense forest. It is here they aim to find a way to the nearly inaccessible higher floors where it is hoped the pursuing zombies will be unable to reach them.
Way has stated that this story was inspired by The Twilight Zone, and with the twist ending to this I can see how that was the case. That ending provides better context to the story, and even with a partial re-read I was picking up on a lot of stuff that went over my head the first time around. I'm not going to talk about that, instead I will mention the meat of the twenty four page novella, which has the four survivors in the bizarre building. The four seemed to have a shared history, with them seemingly having been in plenty of similar situations in the past. One of them is a real hindrance to the group, especially Mallory who is fed up with the dead weight's incompetence, I enjoyed this mini-conflict. I could see this story really working well as a short film, it has some interesting scenes, such as the first time I think I've ever thought about zombies and slides in conjunction with each other. I also enjoyed the feeling that characters had knowledge I wasn't aware of, it gave this a feeling of history having taken place before the story even began, like this had been taken from the middle of a much larger story.
Some of the earlier novellas built off of The Arising showed promise, but this was the best one I've read so far. This was the second one that suggested far more important things were occurring in the Life After universe then Grey and his highschool friends (from the core series) were aware of It may be a relatively simple plot, one focussed on action more than anything else, but Life After: The Maze was thrilling and something a little different to the norm.
SCORE:
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