Bobby Adair's Slow Burn zombie series starts off with an interesting premise of: the *very* first people to encounter zombies will almost certainly get arrested for like, domestic violence and bar fighting and such.
The next time they encounter a zombie, odds are they're in a cell or handcuffed etc
May 14, 2025 05:20His protagonist does just that: goes to visit his mum, finds his stepdad eating her, kills him.
Then gets arrested when he calls 911 to tell them what happened.
And *then* the shitstorm starts, but he's now in a holding tank with like 20 other people as the chaos ramps up.
It's an interesting premise, similar to McKinney's Dead City where *all* the initial police responses to zombies seem to be isolated cases of domestic violence and such, not mobs.
Like, the police are busy arresting and transporting and processing and abusing people going into shock muttering weird shit and confessing to having killed someone.
More zombie stories should start with leaning into "the protagonist is *immediately* fucked up and put into the worst possible situation *before* the shit really starts"
In Frank Tayell's Surviving the Evacuation series, the protagonist breaks a leg a few days before the zombie apocalypse, the first book is mostly him trapped in his London apartment for weeks gradually starving figuring out how to escape without being able to walk
I'd love to see a zombie novel where the protagonist has type 1 diabetes, and before the zombies even show up they're *already* fucked with getting more insulin, and then it gets worse.
Del Toro's The Strain has this early on. The monsters are technically a take on vampires, but most of them are just zombies who drink blood. There is a scene where there is one person succumbing to infection and several others in the back of a police van. It goes poorly for most of them.
