I don’t remember liking the first book much when I read it, but I don’t hate it. And since I already had the second book, I thought I might as well read it. After all, it’s not like it’s gonna take up a lot of time. And reading the first few chapters, I was prepared to be as unaffected by it as I was with the first book.

Until I wasn’t.

The first book had one thing going for it: B. As I said in my post about the first book, she’s a wonderful character study–of a girl who was being groomed to be racist by her abusive father. In this book, she’s still our protagonist–and she’s now a zombie. A thinking zombie. And her journey of self-realization continues even after death.

Nothing much actually happens in this book. We finally get the plot about the mutants and the controlled zombies moving with the introduction of Mr. Dowling, but we still don’t know what they are and why they are doing what they’re doing. We have a facility full of scientists trying to understand why some zombies come back with their brain functions still intact, but we don’t really go anywhere with that either.

Zom-B Underground basically just continues with the development of B as a character. She’s becoming a better person in death. And now that she’s completed her development, of sorts, maybe we’ll see where the story plans to actually take us.

That’s the only reason why I’ll be picking up Zom-B City, the third book in the series. Hoping that we’ve finally come to know B enough that the author will trust us to follow her through whatever twists and turns he has planned.

Because I really want to find out what the effing hell is going on in the world Darren Shan has created. And that is, if not some masterful writing, is an amazing marketing ploy to get more money from readers. By splitting the story throughout so many books when just a couple would’ve done.

Anyway, it works. I’m going to head out and buy the next book.