Ex-Heroes by Peter Clines
Ex-Heroes by Peter Clines mixes two concepts that are each worthy of a story on their own: heroes’ redemption and zombie apocalypse. The story weaves back and forth between present-day events, which revolve around an attack by a marauding horde of zombies guided by an intelligent mind, and a series of flashbacks revealing the backstories of the heroes involved as well as events leading up to the present. Somewhere in the middle of all this, the source of the zombie outbreak is revealed, and the story ends in a high-pitched battle with the fate of one of humanity’s last bastions at stake.
Like any superhero worth reading about, the book has a serious weakness: a distinct lack of supervillains. The zombies more or less fill the antagonist role, and do well, and the outbreak itself comes from an unexpected source that’s a little too close to home, but the only bad guys with powers are a zombied demon whose personality is only seen in his backstory chapter and an actual villain named Midknight who showed up near the end of the book and was quickly dispatched. Of course, this could just be my taste for the darker side of things kicking in. At any rate, Ex-Heroes was well worth my time and an excellent addition to my small-but-growing collection of superhero prose work.